Opera 5
Come Closer
“A cornerstone world premiere”

by | Jun 16, 2025 | Featured, Reviews

Art often encourages us to sift through difficult emotions. Opera, especially, allows space for the most devastating and traumatic events that life can bring. Forming a cornerstone world premiere in Opera 5’s programming for its 2025 Toronto Opera Festival, Come Closer invites audiences into a nuanced and empathetic look at the processes of loss.

Inspired by Rachel Krehm’s experience losing her younger sister Elizabeth to heroin addiction in 2012, it is a remarkably brave and vulnerable piece of theatre, able to move beyond autobiography to convey a narrative that is at once deeply personal and – sadly – widely relatable. As Big Sister (Krehm) proceeds through a series of something like waking dreams, we gain insight into the shapeshifting nature of grief and memory, playing out in scenes of spirited, carefree play, in the throes of tension and childhood conflict, and later in achingly prolonged passages of emotional vulnerability and processing traumatic experiences. Time is flexible here: the storytelling exists in a liminal space between recollection and imagination. We understand Krehm to be rooted in the present, but her mind goes on a journey, scouring its own recesses to try to understand, after the fact, what her sister went through. Little Sister (Jacqueline Woodley) has a more fluid role, sometimes straightforwardly acting out scenes within Big Sister’s childhood memories, and at other times seeming almost like an apparition from a realm beyond earthly living.

The storytelling captures, above all, those idiosyncratic depths of relationships between sisters, capable of veering suddenly from intense love to resentment, but always sustained by a strong bond and empathetic understanding. One of the aspects that the opera delivers most convincingly is the very particular pain of loving, and losing, a sister. While the story is ostensibly centred on Big Sister’s perspective, as the living trying to understand and process the past, Come Closer’s particular approach to loss ultimately focuses more energy on representing the bond of a mutual sisterly comfort – to bring them closer even as they have been separated. As the drama that is more symbolic than literal in its exploration of grief, Little Sister is able to seek support, to be released from pain and put her soul at rest, while Big Sister is able to obtain, perhaps, some measure of solace in reliving and remembering.

Krehm’s libretto is refreshingly direct, avoiding heavy-handed metaphor and both allowing an uncomplicated delivery and creating ample space for integrating her sister Elizabeth’s poetry quite sensitively. The impact of addiction and assault are rendered tactfully, avoiding an overwhelming focus but offering enough contextual clues for audiences to grasp, a welcome change from some opera productions that can be rather heavy-handed in representing traumatic events.

Photo Credit: Emily Ding Photography
Jacqueline Woodley (Little Sister) and Rachel Krehm (Big Sister) in Come Closer

Woodley is a flexible and dynamic force as Little Sister, outstripping the confines of the space, and admirably negotiating the many required emotional shifts throughout the performance. Her velvet tone brings out a warmth of the character’s personality, but Woodley is equally capable of ascending to dramatic heights, allowing the opera’s multifaceted approach to investigating memory and personhood to shine.

Ryan Trew’s elegant score suits the intimate drama nicely, conjuring an appropriate but not overly sentimental nostalgic soundscape, although some of the more extended instrumental interludes tended to lose focus, lacking the variety needed to push through between scenes. With the exception of a few darker, visceral passages, the music is rather one-dimensional in texture and melodic construction. The most effective and moving passage was, for me, Little Sister’s extended aria-like section in Act Two, which featured a more expansive lyricism. Still, the score works nicely for the chamber setting and, under the confident music direction of Evan Mitchell, allows the storytelling to take centre stage without overwhelming the voices. Particularly beautiful moments tended to come out when the instruments assumed more soloistic guises – Trew writes some especially elegiac cello lines that stood out – played exceptionally by the trio of Allene Chomyn (violin), Rebecca Morton (cello) and Trevor Chartrand (piano).

The stage design is simple and mostly convincing, with nuanced touches that effectively construct the private, interior world in which the narrative plays out. Some of the symbolic aspects are rather on the nose, and the use of various props and decor hidden around and inside the static scenery, though inventive, is occasionally awkward. Small touches like a projected television to facilitate the sisters’ weekend mornings watching Charlie Brown and judicious lighting worked especially well.

Come Closer follows a similar trajectory to other contemporary chamber works, evolving from a song cycle to a fully staged opera, a testament to persistence. As a smaller independent company, a collaborative and familial atmosphere was felt strongly at Friday’s opening that suited the opera. Many will have seen the work at various stages of development, and Opera 5’s audiences are something more akin to community than unknown spectators. With its tenure as the newest company-in-residence at the Canadian Opera Company imminent – beginning in just a few weeks on July 1 – Opera 5 has strong potential to expand and flourish while maintaining its distinct identity and mission.


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Jane Forner

Jane Forner is a musicologist whose research focuses on contemporary opera in Europe and North America at the intersection of politics, race, and gender.

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