About the Play:

All the Verdis of Venice (English version of Je vous écris du Caire) is a full-length comedic drama by Normand Chaurette, translated by Linda Gaboriau. This is a play about the megalomaniacal, tragic and passionate world of opera. Surrounded by the director of Milan's La Scala, a retired baritone and the young diva, Teresa Stoltz, with whom he is very much taken, composer Giuseppe Verdi is forced to write his opera, Don Carlo, for political reasons.

All the Verdis of Venice focuses on the composer Verdi and the politics and petty scheming of the world of opera. All great art has the ability to move people collectively, to create within it some essential, participatory expression of their humanity, their culture, their heritage. But who creates this art? What is it that gives some individuals the power or the gift to create such works? Who are these works written for? Does the composer have a particular muse, or are they inspired by an abstraction, a composite muse? Who owns this great art? Is it illegitimate for either the author, the muse, or the people to claim it as their own? Do they all have a moral right to its power, its imagination, its authenticity? Can great artists be forced to create utilitarian works specifically designed for some great or even banal purpose, to forge a nation or to pay one's creditors, or does such an exercise always and necessarily create an empty shell? Can a lover of Verdi ever, in any sense, become Verdi? If so, what happens to the person they left behind, no matter how briefly? Who is the real Verdi? Can he ever be found, and loved, by anyone? Normand Chaurette addresses all of these questions in his farce on the most ritualized, contrived, and yet the most powerful of all art forms – the opera. But his answers remain as ineffable as the questions that seek them. In the end, who we are, composer, performer, or audience, is a collaboration of our illusions on a stage from which we remain forever absent.

Cast: 1 female, 4 male

What people say:

"Rarely has a playwright mixed genres, historical facts, comedy, passion and drama with such dexterity, such imagination. In [All the Verdis of Venice], theatre slips into the wings at the opera." — La Presse

About the Playwright:

Normand Chaurette (1954-2022) was a Québec playwright, translator and non-fiction author based in his native Montréal. A three-time winner of the Governor General's Award for French-language drama (Canadian equivalent of the Pulitzer Prize), he excelled on all levels of writing: his plays and translations of plays have been staged and acclaimed internationally, particularly in the U.S. and Europe. His own plays have also been translated into several languages.