From around the world: Toronto. (North America).(Medee)(Opera Review)

Opera Ateliers production of Marc-Antoine Charpentier's only "tragedie en musique," Medee (1693), was its most ambitious to date and marked yet another stage in the evolution of the company's signature performance style. Of its earlier "period performance" practices, only the playing of Tafelmusik Baroque Orchestra remained. The spectacular costumes of Dora Rust-D'Eye and the sets (often, as here, by Gerard Gauci) always have been more Baroque-inflected than period reproductions, but what has visibly changed over the past few years is the style of acting. From the highly stylized language of Baroque rhetorical gesture, Marshall Pynkoski (director of the production and co-artistic director of the company) has moved the acting style forward to a time closer to the sensibilities of today's audience.

The women still use that stylized period gesture, for the most part, but the men's actions have become more physical and at times violent. Instead of narrating emotion with the aid of gesture, the actors now show it directly through gesture in a manner more reminiscent of the nineteenth-century melodramatic stage. In combat sequences, too, the men employ a style ...