Review: New Opera Lyra’s The Mummy is a spooktacular opera

This article was written for and published by Apt613.com on November 1, 2023. You can find a link to the article here.

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On October 28, I attended the second showing of The Mummy, an opera written by Andrew Ager and performed by New Opera Lyra at St. Andrew’s Presbyterian Church in Ottawa. It was the third of Ager’s gothic trilogy after Dracula last year and Frankenstein in 2019.

It was my first opera ever.

“The broader media-sphere has done us badly in that [opera is] portrayed as somewhat hoity-toity, like a very elitist art form, that is not accessible to people unless they have a large background in classical music,” says Dylan Wright, who played the titular role in The Mummy.

“A story brings people to opera,” Ager says. “Many of the audience members who came out to our Frankenstein production… and many who came to the world premiere of Dracula came to their very first opera. They came attracted by the title and some familiarity with the story.”

For my part, I rode an emotional rollercoaster led by fantastic singers with an orchestra that filled the space with sound beyond its capacity. My sadness for the victims of the Mummy’s curse rose and fell, buried under the choking sorrow of the Mummy’s own loss.

“I like this sort of trope in late romantic, gothic horror of the ‘Other,’” says Wright, “that the audience is immediately revulsed by – but in the end they become the most sympathetic, the most human, relatable character.”

Ager further explains the theme that plucked at my heart strings. “In these three operas of the gothic trilogy, the characters are extremely well known. Doing it in an operatic form allows for quite a bit of character development. In the case of Frankenstein, we went far beyond just creating a large frightening monster. We portrayed him as an alienated being who cannot comprehend how to live in the environment in which he was created.”

“In Dracula, we not only created a frightening vampire but also the deeper character of Dracula which is that of an ancient nobleman, seven or eight hundred years past his time living in a modern era – which at the time was the Victorian era – and unable to comprehend or adapt to the new world.”

“In the case of The Mummy,” Ager continues, “we [created] a frightening image and a frightening character, but likewise he has been removed from his afterlife, his paradise with his queen, and has been brought into confrontation with a completely alien existence.”

I was particularly moved by the love song between the Mummy and the Pharoah Queen. Ager tells me that his sister, Sheila Ager, “is a classics scholar, Dean of Arts at University of Waterloo [who] wrote the lyrics to the love duet… based on the traditions of ancient Egyptian love poetry.”

“You can find something sort of heightened in a particular way in operatic music,” says Wright. “What you really dwell on is the emotion of the characters that comes through the music.”

The world premiere of The Mummy was the day before I saw it, on October 27. “Having something as a world premiere really is a rarity in opera,” Wright adds. “I think the best way to bring new people in is to bring them new works.”

It worked for me. Check out one of their upcoming performances and hear for yourself!

To learn more about New Opera Lyra and their upcoming shows, visit their website.

Photo: The Mummy by New Opera Lyra.
Photo credit: Mitchell Gillett 2023