Opera review: The Book of My Shames is really about the search for love
Tenor Isaiah Bell’s solo show combines comedy with poignant operatics
The Book of My Shames. Photo by Dahlia Katz
City Opera Vancouver presents The Book of My Shames to May 20 at 7:30 pm at The Firehall Arts Centre
AT THE VERY beginning of The Book of My Shames, Isaiah Bell tells the audience that this is not a show that’s all about him. He then notes that it is, in fact, a show all about him.
This gets a laugh, but the fact is that both things are true. The Book of Shames, which the Victoria-based tenor created with director Sean Guist, is a deeply personal piece rooted in Bell’s formative years. On the other hand, its deeper theme is that of the hole Bell has felt at the core of his being, a void he has tried to fill with everything from drugs and hopeless crushes on straight boys to a successful career as an opera singer.
What’s missing, Bell finally comes to realize, is (spoiler alert) love, and that lends The Book of My Shames a universality that goes beyond the specifics of its creator’s lived experiences.
Some of those experiences are downright harrowing; at one point Bell recollects having grown up in a fundamentalist doomsday religious group of the speaking-in-tongues variety, during which time he had the good fortune to avoid all but a little “light molestation”.
By the time his family left the cult, Bell was poised to enter public middle school as an “alien” with no exposure to pop culture and a predilection for dressing like a 1930s gangster, complete with fedora.
Bell manages to balance the painful with the funny by deftly avoiding the poles of mawkishness and self-deprecation. As a result, he invites us to laugh with him and not at him, and to empathize with his sadness rather than pity him in his worst moments.
It doesn’t hurt that he has the delivery and timing of a seasoned standup comic and the voice of an angel. Well, maybe not quite an angel, per se, unless you can imagine a winged cherub singing about mutual masturbation.
Bell is a prodigiously gifted tenor—when he’s not performing his own material, he can be found singing the works of Britten, Handel, and Bach on stages all over North America—but he often wrings the most emotional intensity out of his own songs when he reins things in and delivers the lyrics in an almost-spoken style.
Throughout the show, he receives sensitive sonic support from the quartet of pianist Perri Lo, percussionist Dominique Bernath, violinist Angela Cavados, and cellist Amy Laing. Co-creator Guist gets an off-stage vocal cameo during a reading of Bell’s 11th-grade “emo drama”, Fly on the Wall. This is a creative team that gets just about every detail right, allowing Bell to shine at centre stage.
If that isn’t love, I don’t know what is.
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