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Rebecca Fox stands and delivers

Opera buffs packed the Heritage Playhouse Sunday, April 22 to hear mezzo-soprano Rebecca Fox stand and deliver.

Opera buffs packed the Heritage Playhouse Sunday, April 22 to hear mezzo-soprano Rebecca Fox stand and deliver.

It was Earth Day and this reviewer was feeling guilty not cleaning up a highway ditch when my wife nudged me: "She's a star!"

I wasn't prepared for a local gal to sound like a big time diva.

Rebecca's mother, Adrienne, runs Truffles Café in Lower Gibsons. She's been talking about her daughter forever, as mothers do. So when the prodigal daughter arrives to showcase her talents - with mother producing the event - well, you dutifully attend. But you do not expect to get blown away.

How good was Fox? She was New York good, her voice big and beautiful and at times flirtatious and seductive. Her stage presence belied her youth.

Just 25 years old, with mentors in New York and Berlin, she easily lives up to her "international" billing.

Fox's vocal journey (with Gibsons own Tom Kellough on piano) took us from Kurt Weill to Saint-Saens, Bizet, Tchaikovsky, Donizetti and finally to Leonard Bernstein. Operatic themes favour love and loss, brides forced into arranged marriages, that kind of thing. Venus shows up in Manhattan and laments the hardness of hearts.

It's classic heartache mostly in French, Italian and even Russian.

Thankfully, opera doesn't depend on us following the narrative. Opera sells passion.

By intermission, I saw a tear on my wife's right cheek.

Is that what art does? It frames up passion for our enjoyment. In real life, we pay dearly for it. Life metes out suffering along with the passion. So art is a bit of a cheat - we get an emotional payoff without getting our hands dirty.

Culture - somebody's got to do it.

Next year I promise to do double duty out there in the ditches.