Pulling on heart strings: Puppet opera delves into plight of homeless

When Ottawa guitarist Roddy Ellias was studying classical composition at the University of Ottawa’s music department in the 1980s, he moved into an apartment across the street from the Ottawa Mission in Sandy Hill.
“I got to know them,” Ellias says of the homeless men who were his neighbours. “I saw that some had regular, average lives at some point. … Sometimes something went wrong.”
Around the same time, Ellias was struck by a topic that had come up in his