Review by Mark Morris
All photos: Nanc Price Photography
Pop Goes the Opera
Franz Lehár (1870-1948) The Merry Widow
Hanna Glawari: Sawyer Craig
Count Danilo Danilovitsch: Martin Galba
Baron Mirko Zeta: Ron Long
Valencienne: Nansee Hughes
Camille, Count de Rosillon: Joseph Chambrino
Directed by Brian Deedrick
Conducted by Kimberley McMann
Victoria School of the Arts
February 13, 2026
Edmonton’s Pop Goes the Opera is best known for putting on pocket versions of operas at the Edmonton Fringe, with especially note-worthy productions of Puccini’s Il trittico trilogy of Il tabarro, Suor Angelica, and Gianni Schicchi. The formula is simple, and ideal for the Fringe: local artists, both amateurs and professionals, minimal staging in Holy Trinity Anglican Church that concentrates on character and props, and a very small chamber ensemble as the orchestra. It especially gives opportunities for Edmontonians with professional musical training, but whose musical activities – professional or amateur – are necessarily secondary to other careers in the city.
2026 is their tenth anniversary, and to celebrate they have broken out into a fully staged, full-length production of Franz Lehár’s much loved 1905 operetta The Merry Widow, bravely opening on Friday February 13, with a second performance the next day. With its instantly memorable tunes, compelling orchestration, often subtle waltz inflections, and a title role that has been a vehicle for great operatic sopranos, it is one of the few operettas that have entered the permanent opera repertoire. Almost every opera company in the world has presented it at some time or another.
To mount a full-scale production, Pop Goes the Opera collaborated with the Victoria School of the Arts, using the school’s fine theatre, facilities, and technical help, and in return hosting the school’s students at the dress-rehearsal. The contrast in production values with Holy Anglican Church could hardly have been greater, for this was excellently and comprehensively staged, and was clearly on an astronomically different budget level to their fringe offerings. The set, designed by Douglas Paraschuk (best known for his work with the Stratford Festival and the opening and closing ceremonies of the Vancouver Olympics) and built by the company themselves, used a versatile two-tier structure with staircase wings on either side. It looked rather like a cast-iron Victorian arcade, allowing for multiple entrances and exits. Its versatility was enhanced by the effective lighting, designed by Victoria School for the Arts’ Technical Director, Nico Van Der Kley. The striking costumes, including 1920s creamy-gold for the women and suitably eastern European uniforms and folk costumes, were designed overall by Betty Kolodziej (known especially for her work for the then Opera Nuova, now Nuova Vocal Arts), and acquired from multiple Edmonton sources.
The best known of all these back-stage professionals was the stage director Brian Deedrick, who has directed more than 100 productions across Canada and the US, and was Artistic Director of Edmonton Opera from 2002 to 2011. His approach was to go all out for the humour in the piece, treating it with the speed and verve of a Faydo farce. The tone can perhaps be summed up by one change from the original. The six can-can singers (the ‘grisettes’) who are imported from Maxim’s in Act III are joined in the original by Valencienne, whose affair is one of the two main plots of the operetta. In this version, the seventh is Njegus, the Pontevedrin Embassy Secretary, in drag – the erotic tease of the original replaced by the inevitable and rather predictable humour of the change (Edmonton Opera’s 2015 production did the same thing).
The whole production was, indeed, very funny, and the quite large forces on stage were very well handled by Deedrick, keeping the flow and the entrances and exits rollicking on. Indeed, the first Act characters seeking the Widow’s millions were a kind of parody of rich and generally older male bankers and lawyers as they scrambled for the bank notes the Widow threw about. It wasn’t Pop Goes the Opera’s fault that the spectacle unfortunately reminded one a little too much of the current Epstein revelations, fleetingly reinforced by the very entertainingly sung Weiber, Weiber, Weiber song, especially when translated as ‘girls,’ girls’, ‘girls’ (by 1905 the German word ‘weiber’ was a somewhat crude word for women of low caste). But those are the dangers of playing a work that does have darker satirical tones just for laughs in our current world, and the song was one of the highlights of the evening.
The cast revolved around Sawyer Craig as Hanna Glawari, the Merry Widow. Craig studied opera performance at UBC and then the University of Manitoba, and recently completed an Artist Diploma in Stage Direction from McGill University – she is the founder and Artistic Director of Good Mess Opera Theatre, based in Calgary, which presented a version of Puccini’s La Rondine at the 2025 Edmonton Fringe. I first saw her as an effective Titania in Brian Deedrick’s 2019 production of Britten’s Midsummer Night’s Dream for Opera Nuova, and she held the stage here, the most charismatic and vocally assured of the main characters – she played the role as a confident and somewhat amused manipulator of events.
Baron Mirko Zeta, the Pontevendrinian Ambassador, was played by Ron Long, who teaches voice in Edmonton and has taken the role before, in that 2015 Edmonton Opera’s production. He entirely fitted Deedrick’s conception, both blustering and bewildered. Slovakian-Canadian baritone Martin Galba, who has been seen in smaller roles with Edmonton Opera, matched Craig as Count Danilo Danilovitsch1 , while Edmonton soprano Nansee Hughes as Valencienne and Joseph Chambrino as Camille, Count de Rosillon, added zest to the flirtatious sub-plot. The young Alex Sahli made a strong impression with his dramatic and energetic portrayal of the Embassy Secretary Njegus. He graduated last year from the University of Alberta Drama program, and one can well understand why he won first place in musical theatre performance at the Canada West Music Festival.
Indeed, all the overall singing, including the well-disciplined chorus, belonged more to musical theatre in style and tradition than opera. Again, this suited the overall conception, but sometimes one missed the musical nuances – especially rhythmic – that operatic traditions can bring. One of the music theatre elements was that all the singers were (quite loudly) miked, in spite of the small size of the theatre, and this led to the one disappointing aspect of the evening. The small orchestra, in a reduced arrangement for 12 players and conducted by Kimberley McMann, conductor of the Edmonton Metropolitan Orchestra, played unseen in a pit in front of the stage. This, combined with the high volume of the amplification of the singers, meant they were only just audible, and much detail was simply lost.
But that did not spoil the entertainment of the evening, and the orchestra/singer balance is solvable in any future full-scale productions they put on at Victoria School of the Arts. I do hope they do, for this was an entertaining and enthusiastic way to celebrate Pop Goes the Opera’s tenth anniversary, and Vic’s theatre – due to be refurbished this year – is an ideal size for this kind of work, not to mention the obvious benefits of such collaborations between the arts school and local arts organizations.
In the meantime, Pop Goes the Opera is going back to its roots next: they will be remounting their production of Leoncavallo’s Cavalleria Rusticana at the 2026 Edmonton Fringe – the work that was their very first production in 2016.
Pop Goes the Opera website
- Mis-spelt in the program booklet ↩︎
