Julie Sits Waiting

It's all sweat and flesh...
 It's violence and death...
 It's love at first sight.

In a house under renovation, Julie and Mick discover extraordinary intimacy - and colossal disaster.

Julie Sits Waiting is dirty opera: the tape gritty and raw, the voices both cracked and lyrical, offering a rare and intimate experience in Theatre Passe Muraille's Backspace.

Good Hair Day’s current production of Julie Sits Waiting is an intimate, expressionistic tour de force performed by seasoned performers in full command of their finely honed vocal and physical skills. Fides Krucker as Julie and Richard Armstrong as her moody paramour deliver intricate performances that range from bold, lyrical operatic strokes of great beauty to corporeal contortions and powerful stylized vocalizations that move spectators far beyond the boundaries of traditional opera and into a panoply of sight and sound, gradually building toward a powerful climax. Composer Louis Dufort has created a complex, penetrating score that challenges performer and spectator alike as a non-stop panorama of mixed emotion emerges throughout.

Tom Walmsley’s spare, poetic libretto, combining forms of conversational naturalism with poetic disjuncture, is well suited to the impact of Heidi Strauss’s and Alex Fallis’s tightly blocked, intricately conceived direction. Projection design by Jeremy Mimnagh, lighting design by Rebecca Picherak, with sets and costumes by Teresa Przybylski are in perfect sync with the overall sense of an expressionistic mise en scene that moves brilliantly toward a moving and explosive finale. 

Coming in at sixty-seven minutes and confined by the dark, rough rectangle of Theatre Passe Muraille’s backspace, Julie Sits Waiting is a small gem of complex proportions, bursting at the seams at every moment, giving the audience prolonged moments of spectacular sound and projection as the actors leave the stage, only to return to the fully engaged, and darkly invigorating story they tell through an incredibly diverse storehouse of physical and vocal brilliance. 

Armstrong’s deep rich operatic tones, at times moving into a kind of elegantly high pitched cry, are matched by Krucker’s ability to skillfully move across the stage and deliver a variety of sounds simultaneously lyrical, crackling, and sublime. Julie Sits Waiting suggests a kind of introverted inertia as the opera begins with a lone, seated woman. From thereon in, sitting is the antithesis to what happens in this finely crafted, smoldering operatic drama.

Libretto by Tom Walmsley, Music composed by Louis Dufort

Starring Richard Armstrong and Fides Krucker

presented by Good Hair Day Productions, in association with The Theatre Centre

Directed by Alex Fallis and Heidi Strauss

Set and costume design by Teresa Przybylski

Video design by Jeremy Mimnagh

Lighting design by Rebecca Picherack

Sound diffusion by Darren Copeland

Stage Manager: Sandy Plunkett

Co-Producer: Aislinn Rose

September 14-23, 2012 at Theatre Passe Muraille's BackSpace, 16 Ryerson Ave.

Wednesday-Saturday at 7:30pm & Sunday at 2pm

Tickets: Wednesday & Thursday at 7:30pm: $30; Sunday at 2pm: $30 in advance or Pay-What-You-Can at the door;

Friday & Saturday at 7:30pm: $40

For tickets, call the Arts Box Office at 416-504-7529 or visit www.artsboxoffice.ca

Visit www.fideskrucker.com for further information.