Christopher Alden’s politically aware Rigoletto returns to the Canadian Opera Company

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• Title: Rigoletto
• Written by: Giuseppe Verdi
• Conductor: Johannes Debus
• Company: Canadian Opera Company and English National Opera
• Venue: Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts
• City: Toronto
• Year: Runs until Feb. 14

While Christopher Alden’s Rigoletto may be divisive among audiences, there’s a reason why the director’s staging, stuffed with contemporary commentary on acrid gender politics, has enjoyed a healthy string of revivals around the world.

With Alden’s directorial interventions, Verdi’s tragedy almost feels like a companion piece to The Wolf of Wall Street, studded with scenes of misogynistic mobthink. In this world – a 19th-century salon, accented with panelled walls and plush velvet settees – women aren’t partners, or even love interests in the traditional sense. They’re prizes. They’re possessions. At Rigoletto’s most heavy-handed, they’re mere tchotchkes, playthings to be passed between fathers and suitors like china dolls.

Indeed, Alden’s staging is aware, perhaps even overly so, of Rigoletto’s questionable portrayal of women – at times, the whole affair teeters into melodrama territory. You might find yourself wondering just how much suffering young Gilda (a golden-voiced Sarah Dufresne) might be expected to tolerate at the hands of the womanizing Duke of Mantua (Ben Bliss) and her tortured jester of a father (a brooding, powerful Quinn Kelsey).

Baritone Quinn Kelsey brings his Rigoletto to Toronto’s COC

Loosely based on Victor Hugo’s 1832 play Le roi s’amuse, Rigoletto, with a libretto by Francesco Maria Piave, follows its titular clown through a battlefield of miseries: His secret, sheltered daughter is growing up, and his boss, the philandering duke, has set his sights on her. A plan to kill the duke soon goes awry, and Rigoletto in turn fulfills the terms of his curse, leaving Gilda on the floor of the parlour in a heap of blood-red flower petals.

What matters most, of course, is the singing – and here, led by Dufresne and Kelsey, it is excellent. Rigoletto’s score includes several exposed a cappella passages, and soprano Dufresne in particular is luminous when her voice gets to explore the upper cosmos. Dufresne’s intonation is less spectacular at the bottom end of her voice, but her Caro nome – “Sweet name that made my heart” – is the indisputable highlight of the evening.

Kelsey, as well, is in glorious voice, his rich baritone ably filling the vast Four Seasons Centre for the Performing Arts. Kelsey captures all of Rigoletto’s pain – his insecurities, his loves, his shames – and channels them into a vocal performance that is pure, authentic luxury.

Bliss’s Duke, meanwhile, offers a more sinister sort of opulence, and his persuasive tenor easily delivers on the role’s treachery.

Conductor Johannes Debus elicits a balanced, sumptuous sound from the orchestra and chorus – the men’s chorus, in particular, offers just the right blend of fanaticism and period-appropriate decorum. Under Debus’s stick, the evening of music flows along like a river, determined and contained – but, in those moments of animalistic groupthink, the music turns appropriately chaotic.

It’s Alden’s staging that may run hot and cold with audiences (as it has with critics in previous revivals of it). Michael Levine’s set suggests a palace that yearns for a thick haze of cigar smoke – omitted here for obvious reasons, but almost palpable in the way the characters fraternize with one another, carefree in their cruising and laughter. A flourish of forced-perspective design makes the Four Seasons stage feel much larger than it is, as well, only adding to Gilda’s sense of captivity.

Additionally, Alden adds non-musical vignettes into Rigoletto, which arguably hamper the opera’s pacing – at two-and-a-half hours including intermission, it’s on the shorter end of the operatic canon, and the padded scenes only occasionally add to a story that feels plenty complete within the confines of its musical score. Lengthy stretches of mimed silence – including one that sees Rigoletto drag a struggling Gilda into her subterranean hiding spot – are intriguing, but at times a touch redundant to the story at hand.

Then again, some of Alden’s stage images are outstanding: The veiled herd of men who descend upon Gilda in her naivete, and the gently gilded dunce caps that mark Rigoletto as a perennial outsider to the only world he’ll ever get to know. (Levine also designed costumes.)

In the end, Alden’s updated, politically aware Rigoletto may not be for everyone; that much has been true since its notorious premiere at Lyric Opera of Chicago in 2000.

But regardless of Alden’s controversial staging, Verdi’s lasting score – and Dufresne and Kelsey’s rendition of it as Rigoletto’s centre duo – demands to be heard.