Inside Vancouver Opera is a unique backstage glimpse into the world of Vancouver Opera. Join us as we chat with opera experts, artists, Vancouver Opera staff and others to explore the world of opera on and off the stage.
This podcast offers an insider’s glimpse into the artistry, experiences, and perspectives of the talent involved in taking breathtaking opera productions from the page to the stage.
Find out more at VancouverOpera.ca
Marion Newman is a mezzo-soprano, a teacher, and the voice you hear on CBC's Saturday Afternoon at the Opera. Kwagiulth and Stó:lō, born in Bella Coola and raised in Sooke, she spent more than twenty years in Toronto before coming home to teach voice at the University of Victoria, where she once studied piano.
Recorded in her office at UVic, this conversation moves from a piano lesson in a castle tower to a rehearsal at the Orpheum, where the late Bramwell Tovey stopped to ask her how she wanted to sing his music. Marion talks about the "quiet choir" of family who made her a musician, a childhood homeschooled on Vancouver Island, why leaders need to learn how to apologize and mean it, why she no longer capitalizes the word reconciliation, and the name she carries: Nege'ga, she who is like a mountain.
Marion served as a senior advisor on Vancouver Opera's report on Indigenous mentorship in opera, co-authored by Ashley Daniel Foot and Asitha Tennekoon, out later this fall. Midway through, host Ashley Daniel Foot asks her what an institution owes people after it asks them to talk.
Chapter markers (from the recording)
00:00 — "Stop talking. Just pay us."
02:50 — Ancestors, and where the fight comes from
04:18 — Welcome
05:57 — The first music: potlatch, the kitchen radio, and a grandparents' piano
10:11 — Mary Jackson and the tower room at Craigdarroch
12:17 — From pianist to singer
14:06 — The quiet choir, and being homeschooled
17:56 — Teaching where she once studied
20:28 — Bramwell Tovey: "How would you like to do this?"
23:17 — What an institution owes the people it asks to talk
27:48 — The problem with the repertoire
29:31 — On the word "reconciliation"
32:02 — Ancestors, Nulis, and the big house
38:28 — Nege'ga: she who is like a mountain
6 Sept 2026
Jean Orr & Joshua Beamish: Canada's First Giselle
In February 1948, an eighteen-year-old Jean Orr danced Giselle in Ottawa — the first full production this country had ever seen, with a full orchestra in the pit. She went on to the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, and decades later became a founder and the first president of Ballet BC.
Ashley Daniel Foot sat down with her in her West Vancouver living room, alongside Joshua Beamish, who has just founded Ballet Vancouver and opens its first season this month. Jean describes choosing to die by the sword rather than of a heart attack, because at eighteen she wanted to die dramatically. She remembers touring Nova Scotia with no backdrop and running around the outside of the theatre mid-performance. And she explains, almost in passing, the night she put her mortgage-free house up as collateral so a choreographer would be paid and the show could go on.
Josh had never heard any of it. You can hear him find out.
Ballet Vancouver's Balanchine's Apollo & Other Works plays the Vancouver Playhouse September 11 and 12, with pre-show talks before all three performances. The season closes with @giselle, May 13–15, 2027. balletvancouver.com
Chapters
00:00 — Two people, forty years apart
01:04 — Highland dancing on the prairies
01:34 — A land grant, a motorcycle, and the Qu'Appelle Valley
02:04 — "My absolute lifesaver of life"
03:00 — Josh starts tap dancing at two
04:00 — Nesta Toumine and the Ballets Russes
04:47 — Ottawa, February 1948
06:35 — Nobody called it the first — until Toronto did
07:16 — "I wanted to die dramatically"
08:49 — Josh hears the story for the first time
10:33 — Winnipeg, no bus fare, and Pincher Creek
12:54 — Building Ballet BC with David Y. H. Lui
14:30 — The car raffle, and the house
16:12 — The 2026 equivalent
17:13 — Is dance the most fragile art?
17:45 — Balanchine's Apollo, and Heather Ogden comes home
19:08 — Seventy-eight years apart
Guests
Jean Orr — dancer; founder and first president of Ballet BC
Joshua Beamish — choreographer; founder and Artistic Director, Ballet Vancouver
28 Aug 2026
The Hidden Art of Stage Management
Stage Manager Theresa Tsang celebrates 30 seasons with Vancouver Opera.
Every performance you have ever seen at Vancouver Opera, every blackout, every curtain, every entrance, every burst of light exactly on the downbeat happened because one voice on a headset in the dark said a single word, ‘go.’
She says it hundreds of times a night. She has said it for 30 seasons across almost 100 productions. The orchestra follows the conductor, everyone else in the building follows her. Today we are joined by Stage Manager, Theresa Tsang.
Full Article (https://vancouveropera.substack.com/p/theresa-tsang)
Episode Credits:
Theresa Sang - Stage Manager, Vancouver Opera
Ashley Daniel Foot - Host & Creator, Inside Vancouver Opera
Mack McGillivray - Producer, Inside Vancouver Opera
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Podcast Authority Score: 70 / 100
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