Manitoba Opera returns to comedic, tragic megahits

Opera buffa and opera seria are the tradition’s comic and tragic masks.

Manitoba Opera’s 2025-26 season wears both — with Puccini’s Tosca in November and Mozart’s Marriage of Figaro in April — and as usual, it features a star-studded, mostly Canadian principal cast.

The operas were composed more than a century apart and showcase classical opera’s emotional yin and yang.

Tosca, with its political intrigues, deaths and chest-beating arias is so 1900. Though it’s far too tuneful to be called “modernist,” its gritty realist “verismo” style (an update on seria) and everyday characters reflect the era’s modern rebellion against traditional authority.

In the opera, set in Napoleonic-era Rome, Tosca — played by the celebrated American soprano Marina Costa-Jackson, who recently made her Royal Opera House debut — becomes entangled in a deadly plot when her lover (Canadian tenor David Pomeroy) is arrested for helping a political prisoner.

Desperate to save him, she agrees to the advances of the corrupt chief of police, Scarpia (baritone Gregory Dahl, originally from Winnipeg, but no relation to local soprano Tracy Dahl).

Of course, she’s after revenge on Scarpia, and Puccini fans will know better than to expect a happy ending.

“It’s my favorite Puccini opera. It’s just such a taut political thriller,” says Manitoba Opera managing director Larry Desrochers.

There’s no postmodern or contemporary update on either Tosca or Figaro’s set or costumes: they’re both set in their original periods.

“It’s a beautiful, old-school painted drop production. It’s really terrific,” says Desrochers of Tosca’s set, which comes from Seattle.

While Tosca goes for the gut, Figaro goes for the funny bone.

In Mozart’s work, opera’s favourite rascal, the servant Figaro — played by the season’s other American principal, baritone Robert Mellon — wants to marry his fiancée, Susanna. (Yes, this is the same Figaro of Looney Tunes fame.)

“Alas, there’s another lecherous bigwig to deal with: this time, it’s a philandering employer, Count Almaviva (Canadian baritone Phillip Addis), who wants to seduce Susanna.

That role is played by rising star Caitlin Wood, who originally studied at the University of Manitoba and is making her MO debut.

“A terrific artist and such a stage animal,” says Desrochers.

This may be comedy, but the role calls for a wide emotional range. Witty, intelligent, resourceful, Susanna resists the count’s attempt to revive his feudal droit de seigneur (the “right” to bed his servants’ brides on their wedding night), which is explicitly framed as an abuse of power.

Through disguises and tricks, the servants triumph and the count is forced to publicly apologize to his wife (Jamie Groote, who sang Fiordiligi at MO in Cosi fan Tutte in 2023.)

Mozart’s opera ends on a less radical note than Puccini’s; like the composer’s harmonies, things inevitably resolve — in this case, with the social order’s restoration.

The count is not offed, though viewers may wish he were, but Mozart’s wit and mischief, as usual, disguise profundity.

Premièred in Vienna in 1786 on the brink of the French Revolution, the satire was rightfully perceived as a sharp critique of the aristocracy and it narrowly avoided censorship.

Desrochers says some of the cast in both operas are back to do work taken away from them by the pandemic, which forced the company to cancel its 2021 production of Tosca and other works.

“We’re thinking about what the artists went through, and thinking about inviting the audiences back, and just trying to be really careful and strategic about rebuilding the performing arts. And obviously we’re trying to provide value for the community,” says Desrochers.

This can mean exploring new directions — as Manitoba Opera did when last season it commissioned and premièred Li Keur: Riel’s Heart of the North about Louis Riel — or leaning into established favourites, such as megahits Figaro and Tosca.

Desrochers also says the operas, for all their first-rate talent and professionalism, are expressions of the local community. The productions are supported by a team of volunteers not just behind the curtains but onstage — from supers (actors without singing roles) to choristers.

“The chorus and supers, they all come because they love to be involved (and) you can see this full commitment to put on the best show they possibly can for the community,” Desrochers says.

Tosca will run Nov. 22, 26 and 28; The Marriage of Figaro is slated for April 18, 22 and 24, 2026. Tickets and more information are available at mbopera.ca.

conrad.sweatman@winnipegfreepress.mb.ca