There is an enormous team of people behind the curtains at an opera company.  The librettist, the composer, the audition manager… the SINGERS!  And then there are the Directors…

I asked John Wright to explain the difference between what his role as the workshop director of the Annenberg project is in comparison to Charles Barber’s, City Opera Vancouver’s artistic director.

To put it briefly, Charles is the “lead person”, the one with the aesthetic vision determining all choices that are made in the process of creating the new opera.  He is involved in the musical aspect of the opera, and leads the musical workshops.  John Wright is involved in the drama side of the opera:  he directs the actors (no singers at this stage yet) who are part of the first workshop which explores the libretto or text.

When asked about the story of the new opera, John says  “It’s not so much as political story [... ] as a human drama, but it certainly carries an anti-war message.  It’s not anything which glorifies combat,” he says. “But it’s that strange thing: in order to be a Marine, … you have to agree to combat. That’s your job. That means that you have to agree to follow orders, and you have to be as efficient as you can – and that includes being efficient at killing people.” (Read the entire interview with John Wright in Burnaby Now here:  Overseeing the birth of an opera.)

Beside working on the Annenberg Project, John Wright is also the artistic director at Blackbird Theatre.  To find out more about what John gets up to at Blackbird, watch this interview with John Wright on YouTube .