Can a cup of coffee and a dead canary really sustain an opera? Apparently, they can sustain three.
Pinchgut Opera’s Coffee and a Dead Canary is a caffeine hit of Baroque music, glamour and glorious theatrical nonsense. Director Eugene Lynch pours three miniature cantatas and one flute concerto into a full-bodied blend that is extremely funny, effortlessly entertaining and unexpectedly moving.
Bernier’s Le Caffé opens the afternoon by celebrating coffee’s ability to invigorate the mind and delight the senses. Then Melissa Farrow’s performance of Buffardin’s Flute Concerto in E minor lets the programme—and its spectacular central costume—take flight.
Telemann’s Trauer-Musik eines Kunsterfahrenen Carnarienvogels (Funeral Music for an Artistically Skilled Canary) changes the tune. Its extravagant mourning for a dead pet initially ruffles plenty of comedic feathers, but the grief gradually becomes real. The production understands that loss is measured not by the size of what died, but by the space it occupied in someone’s life.
Bach’s Coffee Cantata brings everything back to the boil, finding plenty of grounds for conflict in one woman’s determination to keep drinking coffee despite her exasperated father. Beneath the frothy battle of wills, questions of pleasure, autonomy and control continue to percolate.
Ariana Ricci, Nicholas Jones and Morgan Pearse move beautifully between sparkling comedy and sincere emotion, while Erin Helyard and the Orchestra of the Antipodes give every change in flavour its own colour.
Coffee and a Dead Canary proves that something doesn’t have to be serious to be meaningful. Sometimes theatre can simply offer exquisite music, ridiculous characters and 75 minutes of concentrated joy—without leaving a bitter aftertaste.
Frankly, coffee, opera and fun matinee entertainment? Pinchgut may have brewed this specifically for me.
#Theatreflections #CoffeeAndADeadCanary #CityRecitalHall #SydneyTheatre #PinchgutOpera