PACIFIC OPERA VICTORIA goes down the rabbit hole and comes up with a film
WHEN TIMOTHY VERNON AND GLYNIS LEYSHON GOT ON THE PHONE TOGETHER LAST YEAR TO PITCH AN IDEA TO SOPRANO TRACY DAHL, “I thought they were insane,” she says. And who wouldn’t? They were asking Dahl to return to the role of a seven-year-old girl, which she had last sung in 1985, when she was 24. And they wanted her to do it on film.
“Because of the nature of opera, older people will sing roles where they’re playing younger people,” says Dahl. It all depends on voice type. “If you’re a coloratura with a high, light, bright voice, you’re going to play the young woman in the opera. The older woman is the mezzo. So I was a little reticent at first because I didn’t want to go back, on film, and play a kid. I love playing young on stage and feel that I can still do it, but I do think that maybe some people are looking at me and thinking ‘oh, come on, that’s just ridiculous’—a feeling she was sure would be magnified ten-fold in an up-close screen version. “But before I even had a chance to reply, they asked me to just hear them out.”
The idea that Vernon, Pacific Opera Victoria’s Artistic Director and veteran stage director Leyshon then pitched was this: Dahl would once again sing Alice in Canadian, based on Lewis Carroll’s , but this time Alice would be a woman of a certain age who, in hospital with an unnamed malady, experiences a druginduced hallucination that begins with her meeting a large white rabbit.
