Mercury venue shrewd choice for opera production

Choreographer Michael Parmenter, soprano Andrea Creighton and soprano Jennifer Aylmer. Picture / Greg Bowker

I last heard soprano Andrea Creighton in 2002, when she was a feisty, ample-voiced Susanna in NBR New Zealand Opera's The Marriage of Figaro.

After four years, she's back in town, heading the cast of Brecht and Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins, which is one half of the intriguing Beyond the Box double bill, mounted by Auckland Opera Studio at the Mercury Theatre. The venue is a shrewd choice, having special associations for those who remember its resourceful operatic productions in the 1980s.

Although the lively soprano admits she's very much the Mozart maid when it comes to international opera houses, Weill's so-called "ballet chante" brings new demands.

"First of all, it's written for a mezzo," Creighton explains, "although I am a soprano with a strong middle. With my background in musical theatre, it would be easy for me to raunch it up and flip into a cabaret sound, but I was determined not to do that."

Although The Seven Deadly Sins was staged by Janette Heffernan over 20 years ago in the city, it's known now mainly through recordings, sung by artists from Teresa Stratas to the gravel-toned Marianne Faithfull.

The Brechtian character of Anna is a flesh-and-blood figure for Creighton, prompted by her work with director Patrice Wilson, the force behind Auckland Opera Studio's stunning Idomeneo in 2004.

"Anna's situation is exactly what young performers experience when they leave home. She leaves Louisana and travels around America, hoping to make it and get rich so she can send money back to her parents. It's the story of so many New Zealanders, getting their OE and, as they travel around the world, feeling all these pressures."

Now based in Paris, Creighton has experienced her fair share of culture shocks since she left New Zealand in the early 90s.

She says Paris is "a hell of a mess". Living near the Paris Opera, the soprano is aware of "huge conflicts between Arabs and Africans, with a lot of gang warfare".

Sometimes the tension is almost unbearable. "After September 11 in 2001, she tells me, my friends and I stopped speaking English because it was automatically assumed we were Americans and we got abused."

Yet there have been musical rewards, working under Jean-Claude Malgloire and, in a few weeks, returning to the Paris Opera Garnier to sing in Gluck's Iphigenie en Tauride, under Mark Minkowski. She has worked with Minkowski before, praising him as determined to prove that Baroque opera need not be "high-brow and prissy".

Creighton enthuses that "45 per cent of the repertoire in the major Paris houses is Baroque, with big names like Barbara Bonney, and audiences flock to see it."

She hopes that Aucklanders will take Beyond the Box to their hearts. She praises the brilliance of the male chorus who play her greedy family, with James Ioelu as the only mother played by a 1.93m Polynesian man with beard, and the artistry of Mariana Rinaldi who dances her sisterly alter-ego, Anna 2.

Creighton is also is taken by the beauty and spirituality of the second half of the programme, in which Michael Parmenter has choreographed Schoenberg's Second String Quartet, with American soprano Jennifer Aylmer singing its two Stefan George settings.

But, now, with the opening just days away, there are calls for quick pronunciation checks, and Peter Scholes and his Auckland Chamber Orchestra have arrived to rehearse what promises to be one of the most intriguing pieces of musical theatre Auckland has experienced.

PERFORMANCE

* What: Beyond the Box

* Where and when: Mercury Theatre, Mercury Lane, tonight, Thursday and Saturday at 8pm