Few operas capture life’s full range of beauty, love and heartbreak like La Traviata. Inspired by Alexandre Dumas, fils’ The Lady of the Camellias, Giuseppe Verdi’s masterpiece tells the story of Violetta Valéry, a celebrated courtesan who dares to follow her heart despite the weight of society’s expectations and the fragile state of her own health.

La Traviata

Kelowna Community Theatre

It’s a kind of magic… Opera Kelowna teams up with the Gary Cable Project to rock out with Queen, the ultimate genre-bending band. This one-night-only event will feature One of Canada’s most exciting and innovative opera singers, Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野, taking on lead vocals made immortal by Freddie Mercury. Under the musical direction of Rosemary Thomson, the night will also feature six Bohemian Backup Singers sprinkling in a few opera gems, backed up by both The Gary Cable Project rockers and Their Majesty’s Strings.

With hits like Somebody to Love and Bohemian Rhapsody mixed in with a selection of tunes from deep within the Queen catalogue, this performance offers Okanagan audiences a unique experience. Our performers deliver the vocal dexterity, instrumental virtuosity, and dynamic energy that Queen’s music shares with the world of opera.

Queen: A Night with the Opera

Opera Kelowna presents the first half of their 2-part studio production, The Queen in Me. With a cleverly comical critique of how race, gender, and sexuality are portrayed in opera, this production gives voice to characters who’ve wept, raged, and died onstage for centuries—now it’s their turn to speak.

Combining comedy, drama, and opera, The Queen In Me is a tour de force created and performed by Teiya Kasahara 笠原貞野.  One of Canada’s most exciting and innovative sopranos, Teiya Kasahara (they/he) takes the stage as one of opera’s most famously complex characters, the Queen of the Night. But the character interrupts their normal performance of vengeance-via-vocal-pyrotechnics to look back at what Mozart has made of her in The Magic Flute. From there, the audience becomes part of the show as they meet characters from Puccini’s La Bohème, Madama Butterfly, Turandot, and Manon Lescaut; Donizetti’s Lucia di Lammermoor; Verdi’s Macbeth and Rigoletto; and R. Strauss’ Salome. Each character delves further into what opera has historically demanded of its women, both as characters and the artists who portray them.

This Opera Kelowna presentation is the Western Canadian premiere of the Theatre Gargantua/Amplified Opera / Canadian Opera Company / Nightwood Theatre co-production. It is performed with a local string ensemble under the musical direction of Rosemary Thomson.

The Queen In Me

Rotary Centre for the Arts

Pagliacci (Clowns) offers a tale of art imitating life, and vice-versa, for a troupe of traveling players. Nedda, her husband Canio, and their fellow actors Beppe and Tonio, arrive at a new town, and they explain the show that they will be performing that night: “the troubles of Pagliacco.” The troupe then joins villagers for a drink before the performance, at which Canio reveals that while he plays the clown on stage, in real life he is quickly enraged about the attention his wife receives from other men. Nedda is frightened by Canio’s dark revelation, but later agrees tentatively to elope with Silvio, who is her secret lover. Canio learns of Nedda’s deception, and later that evening, while in character on stage, he acts out his shame, and rage, demanding to know the name of his wife’s love.  Their play ends in violence, both onstage and off, with Canio declaring “La commedia è finita!!” – “The comedy is finished!”

Gianni Schicchi is the scheming title character who plots to gain revenge, riches, and happiness through one extraordinary con. The story begins when the rich Donati family learns that their recently deceased patriarch, Buoso Donati, has left all his wealth to a monastery, much to their dismay. Rinuccio, his nephew, had hoped that his inheritance would enable him to marry his sweetheart, Lauretta, even though she and her father, Gianni Schicchi, are newcomers to Florence and not accepted by the elitist Donati family.

Although initially shunned by the snobby old family, Gianni Schicchi gives in to Rinuccio’s pleas to help the Donati family, and agrees to meddle with the will by impersonating Buoso.  And then the hijinks begin!

Pagliacci & Gianni Schicchi

Ten years after the release of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report on Canada’s Indian Residential Schools, institutions across the country have, in varying ways, responded to the 94 calls for action therein.  What kinds of change are we experiencing as individuals as a result of all this work?  What opportunities, and what burdens, have we created as a result of this process?

Wreckonciliation is a musical response to the last decade of learning, striving, and failing to reckon with Canada’s colonial past. Mezzo soprano Marion Newman, of Kwagiulth and Stó:lō First Nations with English, Irish and Scottish heritage; Métis soprano Melody Courage, and director Yvette Nolan (Algonquin), have teamed up with Opera Kelowna for an evening that upends expectations and invites everyone to take up the joy, and the work, of building a better future together.

Where do we begin? With the well-known genre of a talk show, of course. For folks that have laughed and sung along with the likes of Jimmy Fallon, the performance will be familiar in its rhythm of banter, and playfulness. Underpinning the wit is an exploration of how traditional Indigenous musics can walk alongside operatic traditions in ways that might inspire us all.

Wreckonciliation

Così fan tutte, roughly translated as “they are all like that,” tells the story of sisters Fiordiligi and Dorabella facing the conundrum of remaining faithful to their lovers Guglielmo and Ferrando. Our production updates the setting from the 1790s to a Rocky Mountain resort in the 1930s. The sisters arrive for their vacation. They cast eyes upon, and promptly fall for, two dashing young mounties. Exasperated and charmed by the couples mooning around the hotel, resort staffer Despina teams up with long-term resident Don Alfonso to play a double trick on them, testing both the depth of their affections and their assumptions about their own motivations. The story walks the tightrope between Opera Seria (serious plots) and Opera Buffa (comedic plots) and Mozart takes full advantage of these moods weaving his music between the two contrasts throughout.  Flighty and fickle? Faithful and true? One could argue that couples must discover their balance to know their future.  While a happy ending is never guaranteed, these lovers throw themselves into the discovery with flirtation and fun, while also questioning what motivates their true desires.

Così fan tutte

This insightful and tender exploration of life’s awkward underbelly is animated by sharp wit and occasionally shocking candor. Charismatic Canadian tenor, writer, and composer Isaiah Bell guides the audience through the permutations of a life defined by what it’s missing — or, as he calls it, ‘The Story of a Hole’. Persistent emptiness of heart drives a young man out from the shadow of a restrictive fundamentalist community, into obsessive passions for bad men, and onward to a successful but strangely hollow life on the stage. The story is both intensely personal and a site for asking one of life’s common, aching questions: How can we find meaning in existence when the goals keep shifting?

Opera Kelowna

22 - 23 Aug, 2025

La Traviata

Mar 1, 2025

Queen: A Night with the Opera

Opera Kelowna