Review: Vancouver Opera Festival opens with two hits

Two anchor productions for Vancouver Opera’s second festival opened on the weekend, and both are hits.
First up was The Overcoat, at the Vancouver Playhouse, a co-commission with Toronto’s Tapestry Opera. It’s a new work with a convoluted origin story. Back in the 1990s Morris Panych and Wendy Gorling created an extraordinary blending of music and movement — a live-action silent film, if you like — to evocative music by Shostakovich.
This was the launching pad for t