Spring workshop cast announced

We are holding the next workshop of Lillian Alling leading up to a private presentation on May 8. Here's our cast:

Lillian – Robyn Driedger-Klassen website

Irene – Lynne McMurtry website

Jimmy/Bobby/Kristian/Charlie – Tom Macleay

Scotty – Ben Covey website

Sergei/Wyman/Sam – Willy Miles-Grenzberg

Drifter/Karl/Bill – Calvin Powell

SM – Theresa Tsang

Librettist John Murrell on Lillian Alling

Lillian Alling – the mysterious historical figure who is the title character of our new opera – told reporters with whom she spoke in the 1920s, in the B.C. interior – that she had traveled across the width of North America, and that she had done it on her own, with neither assistance nor interference from anybody else.

In many ways, creating a new opera requires this same sense of absolute, obsessive privacy. Each individual or entity involved in the enterprise – the producer, the composer, the director, the librettist, etc. – must believe that he or she is following an idiosyncratic personal vision with relentless focus – refusing to allow anyone or anything else to interfere or assist.

As librettist of this expansive new work, I have frequently said to myself that my work must precede and pre-empt all other points of view – that my imaginative ear and eye must create Lillian Alling’s world from scratch, that I must single-handedly pull her world out of the void, and that no one else can help in this gigantic task.

Of course, this is patently ridiculous. In reality, I am only one particular part of the process, only one cog in a set of complicated, interlocking wheels. And I am surrounded by colleagues who are every bit as obsessively committed to the work as I am.

John Estacio is, quite simply, one of the best of today’s generation of composers, whether one considers him alongside his Canadian contemporaries, or his contemporaries in the whole world. Kelly Robinson is a director/dramaturgical advisor whose experience in lyric theatre far exceeds that of most others in the field, equal to the very best and busiest.

Then there is Jim Wright and his team of associates at the Vancouver Opera, who have ably aided and abetted us from the start of Lillian’s exhilarating journey – and without whom none of us would ever have taken the first step. How exceptional it is, in these days of cultural and financial instability that an organization would have the foresight and the courage to launch brave new operas. It is, as they say, a big job, but somebody has to do it – otherwise, opera will live only in the past. Of course, opera’s past is a fine and seductive thing – but, without a future, it is still a well-kept and fascinating museum, rather than the living, changing, surprising, challenging creature that we currently seek to pursue and embrace, both individually and collectively.

In spite of these wonderful collaborators, though – which will ultimately, in October 2010, include our first audiences – I continue to be personally and privately obsessed by Lillian Alling’s story – her bravery, her terrors, her exoticism and her universality. I continue to evoke her poetry and passion out of myself. I take her to bed with me at night, and I wake up with her in the morning – and, for hours and hours on end, I feel she belongs to no one but me – that nobody can understand her as I do.

Then, how much I learn, and how quickly I realize the limitations of my words, when I go to work again with John E., Kelly, Jim, Tom, Kinza, Jennifer – and all the splendid actors and singers who show us new facets of Lillian and her friends and foes – during the 3 intensive developmental workshops we have had so far – and who will continue to illuminate and instruct us as we move toward completion of this compelling new dramma per musica.

I am so fortunate to have Lillian and the other characters in our opera as intimate friends, and Lillian and I are so fortunate to have Kelly, John, Jim, and the Vancouver Opera, to inspire and encourage us. Together we will find the right way to tell this story, which belongs to each one of us privately, and to all of us universally.

John Murrell,librettist
November 2008

John Murrell on Workshop #3

In September 2008, Vancouver Opera hosted the 3rd intensive workshop for Lillian Alling. Probably by now most of you have read the fascinating but sparse historical facts about Lillian’s journey across the breadth of North America, which set our creative imaginations to work.

The first 2 workshops focused on the story, the dramatic structure, and the words for Lillian Alling – that’s my department, as the librettist. With the assistance of several gifted Vancouver actors, Kelly Robinson (our director), John Estacio (our composer), and I endeavoured to shape the incidents, both real and imagined, of Lillian’s saga, and to find the true “folk poetry” of her adventures and her dreams. We remain very excited about what we’ve already discovered – and enormously grateful to the Vancouver opera for commissioning this work, giving us a chance to live in and explore Lillian’s world.

But the 3rd workshop was the most thrilling for me – because we had a chance to hear nearly 40 minutes’ worth of Estacio’s passionately eloquent musical score – eloquent and varied: everything from “pop songs” of the 1920s (the period of our story) to a nobly arching aria for our title character, from a Norwegian barn dance on the prairies to a quartet played on telegraph keys, as well as sung, by young linesman on the Telegraph Trail in northern British Columbia. John has a wondrous ability to blend contrasting musical styles into a unified musical feast, and this opera is clearly evoking his most intricate and heartfelt music.

And, because the music is beginning to be there, so beautifully, Kelly was able to help the five superb singers we had for Workshop 3 to investigate the diverse levels and colours of meaning and human experience which the different characters of the opera share with us – through my words and, especially, through John E.’s complex yet immediately accessible music.

What an adventure we are having. So much lies ahead, yet to be discovered, lived and struggled with, shaped, refined, and ultimately revealed to our first audiences in October 2010. Already, though, there are rich veins of emotion and history, of both the individual and the universal, to be mined from Lillian’s history. I trust and believe that we will reveal her great heart – and, thereby, reveal our own – and those of our audiences.



John Murrell, librettist
November 2008

Lillian Alling Comes To Life

Recently VO held the third workshop for our new opera – Lillian Alling. Composed by John Estacio to a libretto by John Murrell, this full-length, main stage opera will have its world premiere in Vancouver in October 2010.

It takes a long time to commission, compose, prepare and present a new opera!

The first two workshops were held to fine-tune the libretto – the “script” of the opera. Excellent Vancouver-based actors portrayed the characters, reciting what John Murrell had written. Murrell and Estacio, along with dramaturge Kelly Robinson, listened carefully, tweaked passages here and there, and ended up with a libretto that was ready for Estacio to turn into opera music.

This time, Vancouver singers worked their way through more than 30 minutes of John E’s music – starting from the very beginning of the opera and getting about half way through Act I, including a stirring scene set at Ellis Island (the US gateway for immigrants in the 1920s) where people from across Europe sing of their desire to find freedom and security; a lilting, Tin Pan Alley-type song sung by young men on the sidewalks of Brooklyn; and a beautiful, moving “big act one aria” for Lillian herself.

New pages of music were written every evening for the singers to digest overnight and bring to the rehearsal hall the next day. Ideas were tossed out, then thrown out, then modified and tried again; new measures of music took their place. At then end of the week, all of us felt we had a very solid first third or so of the opera, and all of us are becoming more and more excited about Lillian Alling.

Now John Estacio goes to work on the next chunk of music – the rest of Act I and, I imagine, into Act II, in preparation for the next music workshop in May. There will be a final work shopping of the entire work, with a full piano/vocal score, in December 2009. In the meantime, Kelly Robinson, who is also staging the opera for us, and who is Director of Theatre Arts at the Banff Centre, will be working there on some of the chorus scenes.

Stay tuned for more information on this exciting new opera commissioned by VO. You’ll learn more about the “real” Lillian and her trek across Canada, incarceration at Oakalla work farm outside Vancouver, and further trials and tribulations. And you will be able to follow the progress of the “operatic” Lillian brought to life by the magic of John Murrell and John Estacio.

Photos from First Lillian Alling Workshop

The Creators

John Estacio: Composer
John Murrell: Librettist
Kelly Robinson: Dramaturge & Stage Director

John Estacio: Composer
John Estacio has served as Composer in Residence for the Edmonton Symphony Orchestra, Pro Coro Canada, the Calgary Philharmonic and Calgary Opera. He has written for the Vancouver Symphony, the Toronto Symphony, l’Orchestre Symphonique de Montréal, the Manitoba Chamber Orchestra, CBC Radio Orchestra, the 2001 Banff International String Quartet Competition and he composed the scores for productions of Othello and Twelfth Night at the Citadel Theatre. The Houston Symphony, Kitchener-Waterloo Symphony, Winnipeg Symphony, Royal Conservatory Orchestra, Orchestra London, and Thunder Bay Symphony are some of the ensembles who have performed his works.

His most recent opera, Frobisher, with libretto by John Murrell, premièred in Calgary and Banff in 2007. His first opera, Filumena, also with Murrell, premièred in 2003 and was re-produced in 2005 at the National Arts Centre, Ottawa; at the 2005 Banff Summer Arts Festival; and at Edmonton Opera. Filumena was filmed for television and received its national television première in 2006.

John Estacio studied music and composition at Wilfrid Laurier University and the University of British Columbia. He began his professional career after receiving an award in the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra’s Canadian Composers Competition, in 1992. His choral work Eulogies received the Association of Canadian Choral Conductors’ 1999National Choral Awards for Outstanding Choral Composition. He has also received the Syncrude Award for innovative artistic direction for the Young Composers Project, which he initiated while at the ESO. Estacio has received numerous SOCAN Awards for Young Composers and has twice received SOCAN’s Jan V. Matejcek Concert Music Award.

John Estacio currently resides in Edmonton. He recently premièred a cantata by four different choirs and is at work on his second symphony (Victoria Symphony), his third opera (Vancouver Opera), and his first film score, for the upcoming film The Secret of the Nutcracker.


John Murrell: Librettist
John Murrell is one of the most frequently produced of Canadian playwrights, as well as a highly respected arts advocate, mentor and consultant. His plays have been translated into 15 languages and performed in more than 30 countries around the world. He has worked as head of the Banff Playwrights Colony (1986–89), as head of the Theatre Section of the Canada Council for the Arts (1988–92), as artistic director/executive producer of Theatre Arts at the Banff Centre (1999–2005) and as executive artistic director of Performing Arts at the Banff Centre (2005–2007). His work for the stage includes Waiting For The Parade, Memoir, Farther West, Democracy, and The Faraway Nearby.

In February of 2003, the successful new opera Filumena, a co-production between The Banff Centre and Calgary Opera, with music by John Estacio and libretto by Murrell, was premièred in Calgary and in Banff. Filumena was produced by The Banff Centre in April 2005 as the centrepiece of The Alberta Scene at the National Arts Centre in Ottawa. Presented by Edmonton Opera in November 2005, Filumena was filmed for CBC-TV’s Opening Night series and has twice been nationally telecast. Frobisher enjoyed its world première at Calgary Opera in 2007.


Kelly Robinson: Dramaturge & Stage Director
Kelly Robinson is a director and choreographer whose career spans opera, theatre, film and television. He has worked extensively in the United States with critically acclaimed productions of Die Zauberflöte, La bohème and La belle Hélène for the opera companies of Dallas, Utah, Portland and Arizona to his credit. In Canada, he has presented opera audiences in Edmonton, Victoria, Calgary, Winnipeg and Vancouver with new productions of works ranging from Les pêcheurs de perles and Eugene Onegin to Britten’s The Turn Of The Screw and La Cenerentola. Kelly Robinson’s work has been seen at the National Arts Centre (Ottawa), Canadian Stage Company (Toronto), the Palace Theatre (New York), the Vineyard Theatre (New York) and the Eugene O’Neill Theatre Centre. He is currently Director of Theatre Arts at The Banff Centre.
Kelly Robinson made his directorial début in London’s West End with the world première of Peggy Sue Got Married. His successful productions of The Sound Of Music and Guys And Dolls at Ontario’s renowned Stratford Festival broke all attendance records. He has staged Sweeney Todd for Calgary Opera and Arizona Opera, Le nozze di Figaro for The Banff Centre, Un ballo in maschera for L’Opéra de Québec, Roméo et Juliette for Opera Ontario and the Canadian première of Dead Man Walking and the world premières of Filumena and Frobisher for Calgary Opera.

Excerpt 1

LILLIAN. (Continuing a thought)
This land is large and wild and fine,
Such freedom I never knew before…
Here, it is always all right to ask for more…
But I am bound to a promise
That I made long ago and far away.
Until that promise is kept,
Nothing –
Nothing will stand in my way.
SCOTTY. You promised Joseph –
LILLIAN. Jozéf.
SCOTTY. To be his wife –
LILLIAN. More than that.
My life is bound to his life.
SCOTTY. He left you in the lurch twice before.
LILLIAN. He did not know when I come –
Or if I could come at all.
Maybe he thought I would forget.
Maybe he forgot –
SCOTTY. That can’t be true.
Not you.
LILLIAN. You are a good man, Scotty,
But you do not understand.
SCOTTY. I understand that you owe him nothing –
Nothing! Not anymore!
(Getting more and more worked up)
Your life is not bound to his life.
If he wanted you for his wife,
He would have waited in Brooklyn,
He would have waited in Dakota,
He would have waited in Russia
Till both of you could leave!
Look at me, Lillian,
Do you really believe
he’s waiting in Telegraph Creek?
He’s been playing a game of hide-and-seek!
How many more continents will you chase him across?
Never mind – go on – go on and find Jozéf!
Why should I care? It’s your loss!
No…it’s my loss… (He stands and moves away.)
LILLIAN. You do not understand.
SCOTTY. (Turning to her) Then tell me!