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Download the Berlin Program BERLIN The Last NIGHT. THE LAST Cabaret. PRESENTED WITH: VO-Barber COV TLC program half page ad FINAL.indd 1 2019-11-28 8:18 AM The Theatre of Music Alan Corbishley: Artistic Director COMING UP: SEPT/OCT 2020 Music of the Night: The Concert Tour a continued celebration of Andrew Lloyd Webber’s 70th Birthday, touring BC and Alberta. 2021 Canadian Premiere of the 2017 Pulitzer Prize Opera, Angel’s Bone: A contemporary fable that examines the dark motivations and effects of modern day slavery and human trafficking. In partnership with Generously supported by www.soundthealarm.ca CITY OPERA VANCOUVER SOUND THE ALARM: MUSIC/THEATRE THE PUSH INTERNATIONAL PERFORMING ARTS FESTIVAL PRESENT BERLIN THE LAST CABARET A new work devised by Alan Corbishley, Joanna Garfinkel, and Roger Parton Running Time: 90:00. No intermission. Haze and lighting effects. There will be a talk-back immediately following the performances on January 23, 24 and 25, 2020. STARRING Meaghan Chenosky • Daniel Deorksen • Alen Dominguez Brent Hirose • Julia Munčs Alan Corbishley • Stage Director Roger Parton • Music Director, Vocal Coach and Arranger Joanna Garfinkel • Dramaturg John Webber • Set and Lighting Design Christopher David Gauthier • Costume Design Tara Cheyenne Friedenberg • Movement and Choreography Jayson McLean • Production Manager Melanie Thompson • Stage Manager Kattia Woloshyniuk • Ticket Manager Sara Bailey • Graphic and Programme Design Luthor Bonk • Programme Editor Michelle Koebke / Diamond’s Edge • Production Photography Chris Randle • Videographer Murray Paterson Marketing Group • Marketing Trudy Chalmers • General Manager Charles Barber • Artistic Director This production is being given on the traditional territories of the Coast Salish peoples of the Xʷməθkwəy̓əm (Musqueam), Sḵwx̱wú7mesh (Squamish), and Səl̓ílwətaʔ (Tsleil-Waututh) Nations. 2 FROM THE ARTISTIC DIRECTOR Charles Barber City Opera Vancouver is a professional chamber company, now in its 14th year. Our ambition is to widen the audience for opera, and to expand the scope of its ambition. In BERLIN we are honoured and aided by two new partnerships: the renowned PuSh International Festival, and the bold and enterprising Sound The Alarm: Music Theatre company. We thank them both. Tonight’s work began over a year ago, when Alan Corbishley first proposed it to City Opera. Aided by the extraordinary dramaturgy of Joanna Garfinkel, and the witty and informed arrangements of Roger Parton, we offer something you have never heard before. Each of these musical numbers is authentic to the Weimar era, to its spirit and transgressions. Taken together, and in combination with the new dialogue you will hear, BERLIN is re-creation of an era that began in dazzling hope – and collapsed in catastrophe. We explore why and how this happened, through the lives of five compelling characters gathered one last time in 1934. This is not a National Geographic Special. It is a work of art, but its power lies in its validity, its history, and its prescience. Sarcastic, silly, corrosive, damaged, and bittersweet lyrics echo the broken lives of the era. They foretell ours today. Each of the songs was originally written in German. We present them in standard English, drawing attention to the reality that these themes and echoes of history are not so distant from us today. City Opera is deeply grateful to the several translators, named elsewhere, who guided us in recreation of their spirit and power. Our objective in Berlin is to examine the rise of fascism through the manufacture of chaos and consent, deliberate lying on an unimaginable scale, and the exploitation of race, fear, and gender. If this sounds familiar, it should. If it sounds contemporary, it is. 3 Production Photography by Michelle Koebke / Diamond’s Edge BERLIN 1934: THE LAST CABARET also reflects on the irony and shattering truth of Brecht, in his 1941 allegory The Resistable Rise of Arturo Ui. At the end of the play, as people like ourselves congratulate one another on defeating the tyrant and the tyranny, we hear this: If we could learn to look instead of gawking, We'd see the horror in the heart of farce… Don't yet rejoice in his defeat, you men! Although the world stood up and stopped the bastard, The bitch that bore him is in heat again. 4 FROM THE STAGE DIRECTOR Alan Corbishley When I first proposed the idea of a theatrical concert to COV just over a year ago, I could not have imagined it turning into the theatrical gem it has become. That is in large part to my collaboration with Joanna Garfinkel, who has helped generate a wonderful script around these important, yet disturbingly timely songs. As we all dived into the rich history of the German Weimar Era (1919 - 1933), it was humbling to see the immense advances in the LGBTQ communities of the day and, in particular, the studies of gender and its positive interpretations in the Berlin social nightlife. We tend to think of the Stonewall Riots of ‘69 in New York as the start of the gay movement, but one could argue it came into liberation in Berlin in the 1920’s. Had the Nazi Regime not abolished and dismantled the massive leaps made during that time, who knows where the LGBTQ community would be today. Instead, we are still fighting to have wedding cakes made, hospital visits granted, and avoid death by stoning in various parts of the world. It was also disturbing to find trends in political propaganda of the Third Reich that are being used to great effect in contemporary politics -- that being, the ‘spinning’ rhetoric of the German “lying press”, as well as the blaming of the LGBTQ ‘degenurates’, Jewish, and Immigrant communities for creating ‘economic and social ailments’. A testament to what we have NOT accomplished in the last 100 years. Understanding that our contemporary audience already knows the end of the Nazi atrocities, we wanted to focus on the naiveté of the artists who naturally could not have predicted the horrors of what was to come. We wanted this story to reflect their celebration of culture and their ambitious fight to stamp their individuality on the world. And to that end, we explore that exact moment in 1934, where fascism came in direct conflict with an ardently liberal cabaret community that was born from a rich, yet doomed, era of German democracy. 5 FROM THE DRAMATURG Joanna Garfinkel My family came from Berlin, from this era covered in our piece; in fact, they stayed quite late. My great-grandmother built feather costume pieces for the opera in Berlin. Her son, my grandfather, was a young Jewish lawyer, and they eventually escaped to Canada when it was almost impossible to do so. So, when I had the opportunity to work with City Opera Vancouver as a collaborator and dramaturg, I felt both grateful and intimidated by the opportunity. They had already assembled some of the material, the under-heard composers – Jewish, Queer, Communist, and often at the intersections of those identities. We decided to place the piece at a precarious moment, two weeks after the Night of Long Knives. I think resistance takes many different forms, and now, when resistance to oppression is so important, we should re-examine the conventional memory of those lost in the Holocaust, too often characterized in a kind of innocuous and unchallenging suffering. We should conjure instead the different kinds of resistance those impacted carried out. Some resistance is vulgar, oblique, and funny. Some resistance wobbles its way to certainty. It feels mostly accidental that I get to be here, when I have so much in common with the disappeared subjects of this piece, at least as far as positionality. I get to be working in collaboration with the real and brilliant company assembled here, piecing together an imagined one in the last moments they would share. I’ve had a good amount of time to think about precarity; how most of my family did not escape in time. How some people sit as fascism encroaches, thinking that it will all blow over. But we get to throw a cabaret with you, and hopefully tremble our way to a salacious solidarity, a better resistance when it’s called for soon. 6 6 CAST MEAGHAN CHENOSKY Trude Meaghan Chenosky is an award-winning actress and graduate of the University of British Columbia’s Bachelor of Fine Arts in Acting Program. Selected credits include: Olga in Onegin (Arts Club), Judith in Miss Shakespeare (Firehall), Dyanne in Million Dollar Quartet (Chemainus/ Western Canada Theatre), Lindsay in Best Laid Plans the Musical (Touchstone/ Patrick Street) and was honoured with a Jessie Richardson Award for her performance as Dottie in Killer Joe (ITSAZOO). This is Meaghan’s first production with City Opera. DANIEL DEORKSEN Ernst Daniel is an actor, musician and award-winning composer/sound designer. He is a graduate of UBC with a BFA in Theatre, and Co-Artistic Producer of Vancouver’s Seven Tyrants Theatre. In addition to his film and TV credits, stage credits include A Steady Rain (7T), Grease (Chemainus), Pride & Prejudice (Arts Club) & Japanese Problem (Universal Limited). His band Two Apple Tobacco has twice made the Georgia Straight’s Best of Vancouver and is looking forward to their latest release Urban Planet. Don’t miss the series of live events he regularly produces at Tyrant Studios in downtown Vancouver. Daniel is thrilled to be working with City Opera Vancouver on this exciting project. ALEN DOMINGUEZ Sebastian City Opera Vancouver debut. Acting credits: Coriolanus (Bard on the Beach), Marine Life (Ruby Slippers), Sweat (Arts Club, Citadel) The Audience (Arts Club), Cornwall’s Christmas (Chemainus), Rent (URP), West Side Story (TUTS), The Dining Room (Western Gold), The Idiot (PuSh/Neworld). Alen has a BFA in Acting from UBC and is a co-founding member of the Canadian Latinx Theatre Artist Coalition, (caltac.ca).
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