I’ll be Back on Friday

The Toronto 2024 production of Don Pasquale distracted a bit from Donizetti’s overture by presenting a little storybook, projected onto the curtain. The book is open wide, and hand-drawn pictures, with a few speaking balloons, convey a sad story of an old man with many cats.

The man is ill, and a doctor determines that the problem is an allergy, so all his cats must go, which makes the man sad. On the last pair of open pages, filling most of the huge curtain, the drawing shows him sitting alone in a little living room, in his favorite chair.

If you’re sitting up in the third balcony (“Ring 3”), an astonishing thing happens when the overture ends and the curtain opens: the picture book appears from that perspective to transform very smoothly into a three-dimensional living room, with a chair and a man, and then the man stands up and walks across the room, singing.

As it turns out, and no surprise, if you’re instead sitting down in the orchestra level, Row Q (about 10 from the front), the magic isn’t so compelling. From here, you see a fairly predictable disconnect between the projected book drawing, and the actual stage set.

This two-perspective experience isn’t enough of a mind-bender to justify returning to see the show a second time in the same week, but there are other reasons to do so.  Here are a few!

From the third balcony on Wednesday, for instance, there will be moments when you’ll have a little trouble knowing who is singing. Ring 3 isn’t the highest balcony, but even on 3, if you’ve forgotten your binoculars again, you’ll wish you’d remembered, because Pasquale and his doctor are both in the bass/baritone range, and sometimes even Ernesto the tenor can be confused with them.

You need to know who’s saying what, because parts of Ruffini’s narrative are confusing to a 21st-century viewer. Hold that thought.

But down in Row Q on Friday night, sitting pretty close to the middle, you can see everyone easily, and you would just be a jerk to sit there using binoculars.

Here’s another difference: up in the balcony, you are both distant from the singers and above the orchestra pit, so you will get more sound from the orchestra, relative to the voices on the stage. The opposite is true from the ground floor: the singers are loud and clear, but the orchestra is somewhat hidden, and there is no straight line from the string bass section to opera-goers in Row Q.

A smaller factor, favoring the balconies, is that from up high, you can look down on the stage and the sets, and see everything well. At least in Pasquale, there is no towering jail, like in Tosca, so you are well-positioned up there. (I could never see what was on top of the tower, while Cavaradossi slumped and Floria jumped.)

In this production, Pasquale is an innkeeper, and the spectacular two-level set shows a little café upstairs. From close in on the main floor, you might feel a bit too low, to see the action on the second level, but it didn’t bother me. (The low perspective was a real problem at Milan’s La Scala, because the seating floor is level -- or only slightly sloped -- and you actually can’t see over the people sitting in front of you.)

The Wednesday Ring 3 ticket, just off center, costs about US$120, and the close-in seat costs US$139, so I would choose the ground-floor orchestra seat, if I did it yet again. That’s just not very much money for an opera ticket, and the difference is small. If I were buying two tickets, though, I’d go for the balcony, and remember my binoculars.

As a side note, all the seats in Toronto’s Four Seasons Centre look fine to me, and the place is new and beautiful. A wood theme dominates, the place feels spacious, and there’s room for my feet. I didn’t understand the purpose of the gently sloped floor – sloped to the side, with the seats in the center apparently a few feet higher than those way over by the walls – but that’s a nice effect, from anywhere you stand to look at it.

Music to Go Home With

Sure, it was rewarding to attend Don Pasquale twice in a week, because I’m still discovering new music each time I see it. Donizetti’s one of my heroes: he and his friend Rossini know how to stir up the fun and the adrenaline with fast-moving, energetic tunes, and there’s more to Pasquale that I had remembered from two years ago. You want to have a rousing Wednesday (or Friday) night, go see this one, or Elisir d’Amore, or even Daughter of the Regiment.

Half the reason I went, let’s face it, is the two standout pieces that always pull me to the edge of my seat, no matter how far I am from the stage.

The first is the little-known Servants’ Chorus, in Act 3. This is such strange, innovative music, I’m not sure it conforms to the style of the rest of the opera, or to anything else. Very clever composition, in my opinion, with unexpected changes in pace and key and rhythm and volume. My man Gaetano must have had three cups of coffee and all the gears meshing, the morning he spun that one out.

The second is, of course, the tenor’s heart-wrenching solo toward the end, performed with perfection by New York in 2010, with Polenzani and Levine casting the spell. (It’s called Com'è gentil.)  In Toronto, I thought it was good, and worth both trips, but could have been sung more slowly, more carefully, than it was. This song sounds like it could bring tears to the eyes; no sense rolling through it with less attention than it needs.  

First time I heard it, I not only replayed a couple of times, but I also watched through the Met’s 1979 recording of Pasquale, to see how they did it. And after Toronto, this incredible piece hung in my thoughts for many days.

Old Story, Still Funny Enough

The downsides of Don Pasquale are both results of a failure of the basic story to age well. First, must we make fun of a foolish old man? And does he have to be ill-dressed and overweight? Falstaff, Pasquale, the old dodderers, ha ha!  To quote an aging fellow in line at Toronto’s intermission: “It’s good. I like Elisir better, because in Don Pasquale, the young people are making such a joke out of the old guy.”  Wonder if I’d have laughed harder 40 years ago.

Second, the plot appears to revolve around young Ernesto’s impending loss of the inheritance, not primarily his loss of the girl. What’s tearing him up is that, if he doesn’t marry the rich lady he doesn’t like, he won’t get his uncle’s money.

So when his uncle shows Ernesto the door and plans his own marriage, Ernesto’s unhappy plan is to abandon Norina and leave the country, penniless. Twenty-first century update: “Good riddance, meddling old man! Norina and I have seen a couple of operas where the poor happy lovers succeed, so we’re out of here!”  But then there would be a completely different plot.

Green Cats and Laundry

Well, folks, we never found out about the cats, with any clarity. Banished they may be, but this production had luminescent green kitties posed all around the stage, from start to finish. Dreams or memories, perhaps?  No, the doctor or the notary or someone was petting them at one point. Unclear.

Regardless, a clever ending had them bring in a puppy, a companion for the newly-single Don, and presumably with no allergy problems. (As always, hats off to the live stage dogs, all of them, from the unleashed hound on the couch in Frankfurt’s 2022 The Enchantress, to the sniffer-dogs in Lucia, to the hungry Mexican pooch in Taco. Good boy, good boy.)

One more time: here’s a production where they change out the scenes without dropping the curtain, and big kudos for that. No curtain per se, but instead they hang and take in huge volumes of clean laundry, a clever tie-in to the busy albergo, and it’s effective and very funny. No curtains: it’s now an international trend, and it obviously started right here.