The Ottawa Citizen from Ottawa, Ontario, Canada • 37

BEST AVAILABLE COPY 0 B00KSC2 0 CLASSICAL SECTION PAGES CI -CI 6 UVINGC13 $1 8M Bethune won't be ready to open festival NOEL TAYLOR TALKING PICTURES anada's most ambitious film project, Bethune: The Making of a Hero won't be ready in time to open this year's Montre i I I 1 It I I I 4 Jl I till I 1 I i Ji i 4 il I -1 is ii I 13 tl UjI Tl fj. -i fH Paul Gilligan, Citizen D0N QIOVANN Curtain rises Thursday on Mozart's Don Juan By Jacob Siskind Citizen staff writer I ozart's Don Giovanni has been accounted by many the most enigmatic yet most rewarding work in the operatic canon. This year it celebrated the 102nd anniversary of its premiere What is so fascinating about this story of a libertine? Today, of course, there are innumerable interpretations of the central figure's motivations and behavior. The story did not escape the attention of Sigmund Freud and even the Danish philosopher Kierkegaard found an analysis of the hero a subject of considerable interest. Essays have explored the plot, the confusions in the story, the themes of divine retribution, of disguise and revelation; they have examined the questions of life and the hereafter, they have wrestled with the concept of the deity and the meaning of death.

All this about a work that Mozart subtitled a dram-ma giocoso, an opera buffa, a comic opera. There has been room for disagreement. George Bernard Shaw insisted that "Don Juan is a tragic hero or nothing." Eric Bentley writes that "To call Don Giovanni tragic makes no sense The work is called tragic only by those who refuse to consider that such immensity and terror might be within the scope of comedy." Shaw was writing after the devastation of the First World War. Bentley's view is post-Second World War, when man's inhumanity to man became too awesome to consider the fate of one man, even a symbol, a tragedy. Here at the National Arts Centre, Don Giovanni has received only one previous production.

It was presented in 1974 with stage direction by John Neville and revived the following year. The present production is not new. In fact its sets and costumes formed the basis for the version offered at Opera de Montreal this past season. The director of the production here is Bernard Uzan, the recently appointed artistic director of Opera de Montreal, who had, he is quick to point out, nothing whatever to do with that show in Montreal. Uzan is of Italian origin, born in France.

His background is theatrical, not musical. He talks effortlessly about himself and his ideas for the production here. He came to this continent in the early 1970s and for a decade ran a French theatre company out of Boston. The ensemble produced plays ranging from Moliere to Beckett and toured them in New England, the mid-West and down to Louisiana and Florida, wherever there is a French-speaking audience in the United States. "We produced about 10 plays a year for a decade.

About 100 plays in all," he explained earlier this week between rehearsals. "I only got into opera in 1982 but in those seven years I've done about 88 or 89 productions. I've really lost count. "It was quite by accident that I switched to opera. In 1982 Sarah Caldwell was doing a production of Faust in Boston, with all the original dialogues, which last about one hour-and-a-half and are very boring.

She knew me as a theatre director and she asked me to come and direct the dialogues. It was my first contact with opera. "That was in February 1981. 1 did that and the singers included John Alexander, Donald Gramm and the soprano was Diana Soviero, who became the most important person in my life. I married her six months later.

"Then life became difficult because her career was in opera and mostly in Europe and mine was with theatre in the United States. So, she suggested I direct opera instead. "I did my first opera in the summer of '82 in Lake George. I Pagliacci. Since then, I haven't stopped but I have quit the theatre." The next obvious question was "Have you done Don Giovanni before? "Yes.

Twice. I did it once with the Miami Opera Company. I did the second one a year-and-a-half ago, at the New Jersey Opera House." Uzan rattled off the names in the casts without hesi- Please see DONC4 al World Film Festival Aug. 24 after all. Not quite.

With any luck it will be ready in time to close the festival, 4. "Post-production delays" are blamed for the postponement. If a little skepticism seems to be creeping in between the lines, put it down to the troubled history of Be- thune, an $18 million co-production with China about Norman Bethune, the Canadian surgeon who became a Chinese na-. tional hero. Bethune needs all the media attention and promotional hoopla it can get from a festival as prestigious as Montreal's.

It had been hoped to grab some of the hype at Cannes this year but there was -still too much to do on the film. As it happened, another Canadian film, Denys Arcand's Jesus of Montreal could have; stolen its thunder. Besides, Montreal seems a natural. After all, much of the pre-China Bethune story takes place there. In one of its big, scenes 4,000 extras were lured with the promise of a chance of a trip to China for a 1930 political rally addressed by Donald Sutherland as Bethune.

The Montreal shoot took five weeks last November and Bethune wrapped with final shots of the Spanish Civil War outside Madrid in December. But the bulk of shooting 15 weeks had been completed a year earlier in China in 1987. Which is where most of Bethune's woes began what with prob- lems over processing facilities, logistics and language (which added over S2 million to the budget), and infighting between director Philip Borsos and the producers, and a well-publicized squab- ble between Sutherland and writer Ted -Allan over interpretation of Bethune's character. Producer Nicolas Clermont summed it all up thus: "This project has never been easy it was never meant to be." Maybe we'll find out in September. To replace Bethune as opener, an obviously disappointed festival has booked the world premiere of Shirley Valen- I tine, along with its British star Pauline Collins, who won the best actress Tony award recently for the same role in the Broadway production.

In case the reminder is needed, Collins was the rebel-: lious housemaid in TV's Upstairs, Downstairs. Meanwhile, in Toronto, the Festival of Festivals plans to open Sept. 7 with Norman Jewison's new film In Country with the young English actress Emily Lloyd as a Kentucky woman in a family involved with the Vietnam war. Bruce Willis co-stars as her uncle. Olivier's magic The mourning of Laurence Olivier this week has mostly been a stage event.

And yet it's for his films most of us will remember him. On a personal note, he changed one youthful notion of the cinema. What had been a place of four-times-a-week Hopa-long Cassidy Westerns, Abbott and Cos-tello comedies and soppy romance became a place of discovery. In the days before school buses we marched to the theatre where Henry was playing and glumly awaited William Shakespeare. The lights went down, the screen revealed a model London and we zoomed, bird-like, into the circle that was the Globe playhouse.

The play began and we were lifted out into a real countryside of royal courts and savage battles. This was cinema. This was magic exciting and different. Olivier in 1944, the young lion of the stage and the object of Hollywood's desire, had come back to Britain to become an innovative film-maker. Even the enormous budget (475,000) was innovative too.

For one thing he let the camera stand' still; he scoffed at closeup cinema and opened up the screen. He made Shakespeare come alive by "framing" Henry in the Globe playhouse. And he is credited with creating a whole new upmarket audience of lifelong moviegoers. So how are movie audiences going to remember him? Most likely for the over-60 years, of the lethal games-player with Michael Calne in Sleuth, the ever-so-sinister dentist-torturer in The Marathon Man. And probably for the Polaroid commercials.

And they will have overlooked his meatiest part of all, the one out-of-Shakespeare he liked best Archie Rice in The Entertainer. For sheer identification with character, Archie stands out in the Olivier repertoire. This was an actor. Classy company Ottawa's revived International Animation Festival has been granted "full sanction" by the International Animated Film Association at the recent festival in Annccy, France. This puts them in the world class league with Annecy, Zagreb I and Hiroshima, says festival director Frank Taylor.

The biennial event, organized by the Canadian Film Institute, returns to Ottawa next year, Oct. J-7. in Prague and it still challenges those who seek to plumb its depths. Like so many operatic works by Mozart, especially those in which the libretto was provided by Lorenzo da Ponte, the piece is vast enough in its dimensions to hold the attention of people who come to it from a variety of points of view. 1 The opera opens Thursday at the NAC, with Gabriel Chmura conducting the NAC Orchestra and Victor Braun in the role of Don Giovanni.

Sung in Italian with English and French surtitles, it will be repeated July 22, 25, 27 and 29. The story itself is a source of considerable fascination. The Don Juan story was of course not new to either the theatre or the opera stage when Mozart and his librettist fell upon the idea of tackling it. Researchers have found some 500 theatrical and musical adaptations of the story, which seems to have had its first formal telling a century and a half before Mozart (1 Burlador de Sevilla, a play written by a monkV-Tirso de Molina) and which continued to fascinate' playwrights right up to George Bernard Shaw 130 years later. Moliere and Goldoni are only two of the famous dramatists who found the tale suited their ends and among composers, operas by Righini, Calegari, Tritto and Fabfizi were current in Mozart's own day.

TREASURE TROVE Two Montreal shows The Tokugawa Collection: Japan of the Shoguns at Montreal Museum of Fine Arts and The Inca Empire and the Treasures of Peru at Place des Arts are vying for tourist dollars. Here's how they rate. I IN Exhibits include this mummy from the Puruchuco Museum Actors in a type of theatre called No wore masks like this one $30M show rich in artifacts A glimpse of Shoguns' world By Nancy Baele Gtizon staff writer By Nancy Baele CiMen ataff writer MONTREAL old, sex and death belong In Tiie Inca Empire and the Treas- st A ff TinmmM mLuh. Ll- A uuw-uiz-iype non-museum presentation at Place J2J des Arts. DlmlV lit exhibition Onaro ara tmrAaraA ku it MONTREAL Less ought to be more, but at the Montreal Museum of Fine Art, less isn't quite enough.

The exhibition The Tokugawa Collection: the Japan of the Shoguns whets the appetite with 208 objects loaned by the Tokugawa Art Museum of Nagoya, but one leaves asking "is that all there is?" The museum's strength lies in displaying and interpreting objects dating from the first Shogun, Tokugawa Ieyasu. When he came to power in 1603, founding the dynasty that would rule Japan for 250 years, new values were born. Under Ieyasu peace, not war, became the goal. He divided the country Into regional districts for administration, and society Into four classes warriors, farmers, craftsmen and merchants. The story of this radical shift in habits and thinking is told through the working tools of successful gov-ernmcnt wills, written advice, property declarations, and portraits of Ieyasu and his sons.

These documents were done for the practical Ploase 8oo JAPANC5 of ancient Peruvian rock sculptures and warriors. All available light falls dramatically on 250 gold and silver death masks, Jewelry, idols and ceremonial knives loaned by Peru's Museum of Gold. As well there are 75 ce- ramies including 25 erotic pieces from the Rafael Larco Museum and a mummy from the Puruchuco Museum. This is an exhibition rich in artifacts, many of which have not been seen before outside Peru. Valued at 30-mlllion they speak across the ages about a highly developed lost culture.

Without rpnriinir anv text nr lisfpnlno (n an aiiHinouMn nr knuina anu nrl. or knowledge of pre-Columbian art you could visit this exhibition and come BC uwajr wiui mic guiiuiui iitVH LHUl mu pwjpie Wild IIVCQ ITU III Please see PERUC4.