Review: The Flying Dutchman layers imagery and lush music for striking production at Vancouver Opera — Stir (2024)

Vancouver Opera presents The Flying Dutchman at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre on May 4 and 7

EERILY ATMOSPHERIC projections and powerful singing help conjure a suitably stormy The Flying Dutchman, in Vancouver Opera’s first mounting of it in more than two decades.

Nineteenth-century composer Richard Wagner’s monumentally scaled work featured a more realistic seafaring setting in its last staging here in 2001. This time out, there’s no literal ship bow or Norwegian shorefront village; instead, the action takes place across two sleek, slanted ramps that bring to mind not just a sinking boat—especially when a crew of Norwegian sailors are tossed up and down its diagonals—but psychological instability. To the right on the stage, an oversized ship’s wheel sometimes turns on its own ghostly power. Behind and above are screens layered and fragmented into mismatched quadrilaterals, Wladimiro A. Woyno Rodriguez’s animated projections conjuring a gothically expressive visual world of red-glowing hellfire coals, heaving waves, spinning cyclones, and ever-turning wheels of fate.

The German opera, with its basis in ancient legend and its themes of the supernatural, turns out to be ideally suited to digital projections. Never feeling like a gimmick or background, the animated graphics perfectly capture and expand on the tumultuous inner thoughts of the characters and the swirling emotions in the music, connecting vividly with the larger cosmic themes. The Dutchman’s blinking eye might morph into a giant moon and then a ship’s porthole.

The arresting title character, sung with brooding intensity by Gregory Dahl, wears tattoos across his bald head and a long, red-and-black plume-collared coat. The haunted ship captain is cursed to roam the seas for eternity, with just one chance every seven years to go ashore and find a faithful bride who can end his curse. The captain Daland (resonant Welsh bass Richard Wiegold) is only too happy to exchange his daughter Senta (Marjorie Owens) for the Dutchman’s riches. She becomes obsessed with trying to save his soul.

Dahl makes your blood run cold when he arrives onstage—bemoaning his “dread sentence of damnation”—but makes you feel enormous empathy for him by the end. Looking like a hulking punk vampire, he’s very much a misunderstood outsider used to people cringing away from him. He only begins to soften his hard front around the warm and empathetic Senta.

This is an epic sing, and the baritone Dahl commands the stage. In her signature role, Owens never loses the warmth and compassion behind the superhuman vocal work that Wagner demands. Her second-act ballad about the legend of the Dutchman, backed by a gorgeous women’s chorus, is spellbinding. Wielding a supercharged tenor, Wookyung Kim is a discovery as Senta’s spurned suitor, Erik.

Stage director Brian Deedrick makes some effective choices at the helm. We see Senta, who normally only appears in Act 2, loom early on as an ever-watchful presence—a choice that gives her more agency than a passive, naive property of her father. And there is some inventive staging of the Wagnerian-scaled chorus scenes: the women’s Spinning song features their whirling wheels lined up across the slanted planes. Deedrick gets around the challenge of depicting the ghost ship crew with Rodriguez’s eerie green-glowing projections and some cool zombie moments—including a sequence of reanimation near the end. And the memorable finale, which we won’t give away here, is a unique payoff of poignance and drama.

Lighting designer Gerald King adds to the expressionistic effect—most strikingly in the scene where the Dutchman and Senta first spot each other, lit in the darkness from opposite ends of the stage.

The Vancouver Opera Orchestra, under maestro Leslie Dala, does the lush and demanding score justice, from its famous swirling, storm-thrown opening to the ending’s powerhouse crescendo. (Extra kudos for instantly recovering from a momentary loss of light in the pit on opening night.)