Perfectly Normal: Queer Opera in Canada

Abstract

In the 1991 movie Perfectly Normal, a quiet, opera-loving Italian-Canadian named Renzo works in a beer factory by day and drives his father’s cab by night. For fun, he plays goal for a hockey team. One night he picks up Alonzo Turner, chef and entrepreneur, as a cab fare, and subsequently the two enter into a business arrangement. Alonzo opens a theme restaurant: servers dress as opera characters, and Renzo, in drag, sings the role of Bellini’s Norma in a quavering falsetto. Renzo rushes from rink to stage, shedding goalie pads for Druid gear. Two kinds of performance overlap in Perfectly Normal: athletic and operatic. This film has no specifically gay content, but the collision of unlikely spheres of cultural activity is campy and comic. Hockey may just be opera on ice. Opera, like hockey, requires highly skilled physical feats executed on demand in front of attentive, ticket-buying audiences in large venues. Opera, like hockey, is a form of performed theatre, with star turns, teamwork, rehearsals, curtain calls. Opera, like hockey, inspires in its fans Herculean labours of statistical memory: debut season, best repertory, highest high notes, nights of unforgettable excellence, grandiosity. Nevertheless, similarities between hockey and opera should not screen the enormous differences between these undertakings, especially their encoding of gender stereotypes. Hockey is “rough-and-tumble”; opera is “effeminate.” To speak of “queer” opera may seem redundant to hockey-sweater-wearing Canadians. At the end of the day, a locker room is not a green room; Siegfried’s sword is not a hockey stick.