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Tenor Roger Honeywell finds role with Pacific Opera Victoria

Pacific Opera Victoria’s Ariadne auf Naxos When: Tonight, Saturday and Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. Matinée Feb. 23 at 2:30 p.m. Where: Royal Theatre Tickets: $40-$125 at 250-386-6121 or rmts.bc.ca.
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VICTORIA, B.C.: FEBRUARY 10, 2014 (For Amy's Tuesday interview) The Tenor, Bacchus, played by Roger Honeywell, left, and Bruce Kelly as Music Master. Dress rehearsal for POV

Pacific Opera Victoria’s Ariadne auf Naxos

When: Tonight, Saturday and Feb. 21 at 8 p.m. Matinée Feb. 23 at 2:30 p.m.

Where: Royal Theatre

Tickets: $40-$125 at 250-386-6121 or rmts.bc.ca. Student rush tickets $15 at the door 60 minutes before each performance, subject to availability.


For many opera performers, learning to act comes as an afterthought to years of strenuous vocal training.

Tenor Roger Honeywell did things in reverse.

The Toronto-based performer, who sings (and acts) the roles of Bacchus and The Tenor in Pacific Opera Victoria’s production of Ariadne auf Naxos, didn’t take an opera lesson until he was in his early 30s.

He said he wasn’t intimidated by singers who had been training since childhood.

“I was naive enough not to think about any of that. I thought I’d just go for it, the worst thing that could happen was I’d just be a better-singing actor down the years,” he said.

Honeywell already had five years of experience at the Shaw and Stratford festivals under his belt and he took an actor’s approach to the new project. For the first few years, he just imagined he was playing the role of an opera singer.

“That’s the way I thought about it, you can do this, just fake it till you make it,” he said. “That was 14 years ago. So I’m still faking it.”

It seems appropriate to watch Honeywell — who has since sung with the Metropolitan Opera and the Canadian Opera Company — perform in Strauss’s Ariadne auf Naxos, which is centred on an opera within the opera.

The prologue opens with the richest man in Vienna hosting a party. He planned to treat his guests to a serious new opera, The Tragedy of the Jilted Ariadne, followed by a burlesque farce, The Fickle Zerbinetta and Her Four Lovers. But when dinner runs late, the performers learn they must perform the two at once. Tragedy and comedy collide, etc.

This is the first time POV has presented Ariadne since 1999, the same year Honeywell began pursuing an opera career. The show is directed by Oriol Tomas, with set design by Ian Rye, lighting design by Kimberly Purtell, costume design by Sheila White and choreography by Jacques Lemay.

POV artistic director and conductor Timothy Vernon called the score, written by Strauss with German libretto by Hugo von Hofmannsthal, one of his favourites. It evolved from a 30-minute divertissement to be performed after Hofmannsthal’s adaptation of Moliere’s play Le Bourgeois gentilhomme.

“It’s rewarding not just because of the beautiful music, but because of the nature of the text and the history of how it came to be,” Vernon said. “It’s an intellectually stimulating and rewarding piece as well.”

He said the Victoria Symphony orchestra has embraced the challenging score.

Honeywell sings as both the pompous, attention-seeking Tenor of the opera, as well as the young, romantic god Bacchus in the burlesque.

He began acting at his high school in North York, north of Toronto, after watching a production of Jesus Christ Superstar.

“I thought, what power. I just wanted to be part of that. That, and there’s lots of girls — so not the loftiest of ambitions. But you do what you’ve got to do when you’re a high school student,” he said.

Honeywell was already an award-winning actor when director Brian Macdonald told him he had a “substantial voice” during an audition and suggested he might look into opera.

“I’d heard that before from other people, but when I heard it from Brian it set off some triggers for me,” said Honeywell, whose mother was also an opera singer.

When he found himself presenting at the Dora Mavor Moore Awards alongside Richard Bradshaw, artistic director for the Canadian Opera Company, he asked Bradshaw if he could sing for him. Bradshaw welcomed him to the company’s chorus.

Honeywell said he still approaches his opera characters as an actor.

“I take apart the text and I try to find clues to the character from what I say and what the other characters say about my character,” he said.

“So when I come to the music, I’ve done a lot of work textually already.”

The music itself is a new source of inspiration.

“The great composers I get to sing, they’re all masters,” he said.

“And the composers give you so much of your subtext and your emotional quality through the fabric of the music.”

asmart@timescolonist.com