2010
20
Apr
Down the rabbit hole with Nixon in China – Cultural Olympiad Features : Vancouver 2010 Winter Olympics
From the moment a full-scale model of Air Force One lands on stage, it’s clear that Nixon in China is an opera that aims to be larger than life.
In this new production of John Adams’s 1987 historical masterpiece, which is being performed for the first time in Canada on March 13, director Michael Cavanaugh says they’ll be trying to do more than just capture the essence of one of the most notorious diplomatic visits of the 20th century.
“This is a bigger subject than just Nixon, and just China, and just US-Chinese relations,” he says in an interview from Vancouver, where the show’s start-studded cast, which includes Robert Orth and Alan Woodrow, is currently in rehearsals. “It really addresses the notion of history, of momentous events, and how they affect their participants as well as and how they affect the wider world.”
Through the massive scale of this opera, which is reflected in its set design, Cavanaugh says he has been able to examine pressures that individuals in powerful positions, including Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger and Chairman Mao Tse-tung were under, particularly as they made gestures and choices that changed modern geopolitics.
”What I want to show with this production is the way our memories of these big events become overtaken by these pressures,” he says. “The way we view these big events, through this prism of memory, refracts into all sorts of different directions. Through this fractured lens, we get a chance to see what really makes these people tick, what makes all of us tick, in these big moments.”
Cavanaugh says opera enthusiasts couldn’t be more excited about this new production of the play, and that some will be travelling great distances to be at its Canadian premiere.
“The show has this core group of opera fanatics, lots of them. There are people who are travelling a long way to see this opera because it’s so rarely produced,” he says. “It’s only 23 years old, and it is already being regarded as a masterpiece.”
He says Nixon in China is so highly regarded because of its complex mix of traditional operatic forms and beautiful ballet sequences as well as its Alice in Wonderland sense of fantasy.
“Almost every set explodes or deconstructs or spins off into a different thing and becomes something else,” says Cavanaugh. “For people who have never been to an opera before, this production has real visual impact. You’ll get a lot of eye candy and ear candy.”
“By the end of the piece, all bets are off. We’ve pried off everyone’s skulls and we’re looking inside at their innermost thoughts and feelings,” he says. “It’s a big spectacle and a big historical drama set piece, but it also uses the human voice to carry us inside ourselves.”
Nixon in China runs March 13, 16, 18 and 20 at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre, Hamilton Street at West Georgia, Vancouver. Tickets from $29.