JIM AIKENS

Joan Baillie is an opera archivist and an opera enthusiast who sets out in this book to demonstrate that 'Torontonians have always had a taste for this particular art form, wherever it was available.' The subtitle calls it an 'album' and that is exactly what it is, an opera enthusiast's scrapbook album. An accumulation of 160 years of memorabilia and records of opera performance in Toronto has been arranged in a scrapbook format, mixing press clippings, advertisements, reviews, and theatre descriptions, drawings and photographs of theatres and artists, floor plans, playbills, and other occasional documents - with very little accompanying text other than an introduction by William Kilbourn and the author's brief foreword and epilogue.

As the subtitle suggests, Mrs Baillie has chosen to arrange her collection according to the places in which operatic performances were given, the lyric theatres. The book is therefore divided into 50 sections, each treating a separate location in roughly chronological order. The sites range from Frank's Hotel (1825) to Roy Thomson Hall (1982), with a special section devoted to outdoor performances. All the expected places are here: the Grand Opera House (1874), Massey Hall (1894), The Princess Theatre (1896), Shea's (1903), The Royal Alexandra (1910), and Hart House (1923); but so too are many unknown or unsuspected places of amusement: the Crystal Palace (1860), Hanlan's Point (1884), The Art Gallery of Ontario (1948), the CNE Coliseum (1922), and even the Royal York Hotel (1929)!

In an appendix, four charts graphically summarize operatic activity in Toronto, the life-spans of its lyric theatres, and the frequency of performance of individual works over the period covered by the book. These graphs provide an interesting and useful summary, but seem out of place in a scrapbook, and unfortunately indicate no source for their statistical information. It should be pointed out, however, that sources for all the illustrative material are scrupulously credited.

This arrangement has some drawbacks. First, especially for the early decades, the lack of suitable illustrative material leads to certain photographs reappearing with irritating regularity. While such duplication may suggest the recurring visits of artists from one season to another, we soon grow tired of the seven reproductions of a not very attractive photography of Anna Bishop within 44 pages, or five recurrences of a pompous-looking Signor Brignoli in the space of only 22 pages. The period maps, too, with which Mrs. Baillie introduces each section admirably situate each of the buildings in space and time but become repetitious because only a limited number of different maps are used.

On the other hand this approach is not without its advantages. First and foremost, Mrs. Baillie achieves her aim through the sheer force of accumulation. After 298 pages of hard factual evidence, repeated for 50 sites, we are convinced that opera has indeed had a long and full history of performance in Toronto. Torontonians flocked to hear and see the great and not so great operas and singers long before the era of Lotfi Mansouri or even Herman Geiger-Torel, and have continued to do so. Second, in carefully assembling such a mass of hard-to-find and often previously unpublished material - clippings and pictures, especially - Mrs Baillie has produced an invaluable source book on Toronto's theatres, not only for opera lovers but of great interest to anyone who cares to know about the city's theatrical past. For, despite what seems to be a fond belief that the "opera" in "opera house" had something to do with what we today call "opera", and that these palaces only produced non-musical plays faute de mieux, Mrs Baillie's book documents most of the important Toronto playhouses of the last 160 years, in many cases very well.

In summary, then, while Look at the Record seems to be a coffee-table book for opera lovers - and its primary concern is most definitely the lyric theatre - its substantial more general content makes it a valuable resource in Canadian theatre history. It is a fascinating collection of documents, of interest to the professional historian, the student and the general reader - whether they care as intensely about the opera as Mrs Baillie or not.