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A Creature of Habit (2009)

A Creature of Habit is a new opera inspired by the early seventeenth-century writings of Sir Richard Whitbourne. Whitbourne was an English sea captain, a governor and the first person to conduct a formal court of law in the New World. His publication A Discourse and Discovery of New-Founde-Land (1615) was written to encourage European settlers to come to Newfoundland and was distributed to parishes throughout Great Britain with just that aim. The final paragraph of the long, but eloquently written work, describes an encounter that Whitbourne supposedly had with a mermaid in St. John's harbour in 1610. It is a fantastically poetic admission from an otherwise stoic military-man and scientific naturalist. It is this episode, which inspired the events of A Creature of Habit.

Commissioned by Rising Tide Theatre, the opera premiered in at the company's Seasons in the Bight summer festival in Trinity, NL on July 16, 2009. Burry is thrilled to have had another opportunity to bring opera to an area which shaped him so much as an artist.

Listen: Creature of Habit
A Mountain Stand Tall

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Listen: CBC Podcast (A Creature of Habit Interview)

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Pandora's Locker (2008)

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The contemporary youth opera Pandora's Locker is inspired by the Greek myth of Pandora's Box, in which a young woman's curiosity leads to the unleashing of all the world's evils. It is a simple, archetypal myth, which reflects our own hunt for knowledge and the potential for disaster upon its discovery. This search for information - keys to the future and past - is never more tangible than in the "up-and-down" lives of the average high school teenager. Pandora's curiosity is timeless.

Pandora's Locker was commissioned by The Glenn Gould School of the Royal Conservatory of Music in Toronto, Canada. The opera created for a mid to late teen audience featured a local turntablist, DJ Fields and received wide spread acclaim for its edgy and relevant story. It premiered at the Telus Centre for the Performing Arts on December 5, 2008.

Listen: Pandora's Locker
Scene 1 Excerpt, Wallis Giunta as Pandora

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Listen: Pandora's Locker
There's a Fire Inside of Me

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Listen: Classical 96 FM Interview
Wallis Giunta

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"Dean Burry did the seemingly impossible with Pandora's Locker, an opera for teens, earlier this month for the Royal Conservatory of Music's Glenn Gould School. His most inspired move was asking a scratch DJ to augment the orchestra."

-John Terauds, Toronto Star

"powerful and uncompromising in its honesty and inspiration."

-David Visentin, Associate Dean, GGS

"A splendid exemplar of how ancient myth can reveal its truth in the most contemporary setting."

-Wayne Gooding, Opera Canada Magazine

The Heart That Knows (2008)

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Live Bait Theatre Mainstage production The Heart That Knows by Charle Rhindress and Dean Burry. Adapted from the novel by Charles G.D. Roberts. Known as the father of Canadian poetry, Charles G.D. Roberts' work was heavily influenced by the geography of Sackville and the surrounding marshes. This musical adaption of his most famous novel is by the team behind two of Live Bait's most successful original

"A drama that excites on many levels"

-Dale Fawthrop, Halifax Chronicle Herald



Isis and the Seven Scorpions (2006)

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Three young archaeologists lost in the Egyptian desert unravel the ancient myth of Isis in an effort to save their dying professor. Immersed in the epic struggle of a distant past, they discover the healing power of ancient wisdom.

Isis and the Seven Scorpions followed Burry's highly acclaimed opera for young people, The Brothers Grimm. The 45-minute opera, commissioned by the Canadian Opera Company, is scored for 4 singers and piano and premiered in Toronto in April 26, 2006. The work was also remounted in June 2006 for the gala opening The Four Seasons Centre for the Arts, the COC's new home. In this regard, Isis and the Seven Scorpions was the first staged opera ever performed in Canada's first and only dedicated opera house.

"Scorpion opera gives kids the bug"

-John Terauds, Toronto Star

The Vinland Traveller (2006)

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The Vinland Traveler was commissioned by Memorial University of Newfoundland's Opera Roadshow and was toured across the entire province in Spring 2006. The tour also included performances in Northern Labrador Inuit and Innu schools. The opera was recorded by CBC Radio and broadcast in the 2006/2007 season of CBC's Musicraft.

The opera is set in the year 1030AD. Snorri, an Icelandic farmer searches Europe to reveal the story of his parents' journey to the New World. It is the story of Snorri's own birth and the Viking's struggle to overcome their own violent nature in the face of unknown peril.

The Vinland Traveler is based on the third New World voyage described in The Saga of the Greenlanders and connects the worlds of Medieval Europe to Newfoundland. A comical Puffin makes an appearance to remind the Viking's that life need not be so serious.

Listen: The Vinland Traveler, Scene One

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Listen: The Vinland Traveler, Scene Two opening "The Storm"

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Listen: Interview with Caroline Schiller, director of MUN Opera Roadshow

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The Hobbit (2004)

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While working on The Brothers Grimm at the Canadian Opera Company, Burry was introduced to the new Artistic Director of The Canadian Children's Opera Chorus, Ann Cooper Gay. The CCOC is an independent organization, but provides a children's chorus for COC productions when needed (such as in La Bohème, Turandot and Carmen.) In June 2000, Cooper Gay asked Burry to seek out a subject for a commission and following the summer, J.R.R. Tolkien's fantasy epic The Hobbit was chosen. This was, of course one of the hottest properties at the time as Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings trilogy was to hit movie theatres a year later. The rights were obtained from The Saul Zaentz Company and Burry's The Hobbit became the first opera based on a work by Tolkien.

The opera premiered on May 15 to great acclaim and sold-out audiences. The Toronto Star listed the production as "The Hot Ticket" for that weekend. At the premiere, world-renowned Canadian baritone John Fanning performed the role of Gandalf. The Toronto run was followed, in June 2004, by an East Coast tour to Prince Edward Island, New Brunswick and Nova Scotia.

Listen: Far Over the Misty Mountains
There And Back Again, Canadian Children's Opera Chorus, Used by Permission

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Listen: O Brethil Linden, The Hobbit Orchestral Suite
Orchestra Toronto, Used by Permission

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"One children's opera to rule them all."

-Robert Harris, The Globe and Mail

"Anticipation was high on May 15 when the Canadian Children's Opera Chorus unveiled The Hobbit. Both the opera and the production proved to be great successes. Burry's libretto has the great advantage of avoiding the moralizing that spoils so many works for children. Burry seems to have learned from Britten how to spin spare, intriguing melodies that suit the volume level a child or group of children can produce. This is a work children will not only wish to see, but long to be in."

-Christopher Hoile, Opera Canada

"Composer and librettist Dean Burry has followed the Tolkien original closely, fashioning a picaresque piece with a strong narrative line driven by rhythmically vital and melodic music. One of the recurring choruses, 'Far Over the Misty Mountains' surely promises to become a modern classic for children's choirs."

-Wayne Gooding, Opera Now

Home and Away (2003)

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Following Under the Night, Burry planned a new collaboration with playwright Charlie Rhindress. Inspired by Canada's love/hate relationship with hockey, Home and Away tells the story of a family that is both held together and torn apart by this national obsession. The show follows the format of a hockey game starting with the national anthem and including three periods, intermissions and, of course, interviews with the Don Berry, the "Coach on the Couch in the Corner."

Home and Away was commissioned and premiered by Live Bait Theatre in Sackville, NB in May 2003. The originally production was performed "in the round" in a specially built rink and received its Ontario premiere at Theatre Orangeville in September 2003.

"Home and Away by Charlie Rhindress and Dean Burry has what it takes for a great night out. Poignancy, satire, tears and belly laughter all rolled into a truly Canadian package. Rhindress and Burry have a winner.within a few years, this show will be playing coast to coast."

-Amherst Daily News

"Rhindress and Burry have transformed this conventional story line into something magical by putting the action on ice, complete with teams, face-offs, breakaways, announcers, colour commentary and the audience in the bleachers.Rock, country, ballad jazz and gospel tunes coexist happily in this exuberant score.it's grand entertainment with and appeal so broadly Canadian that it has the potential to bring audiences to their feet, cheering, from one end of the country to another."

-Sackville Tribune Post

"Home and Away, Live Bait Theatre's exploration of hockey's impact on Canadian family life scores quick and often on its way to winning the hearts of its audience.funny, witty and heart wrenching.(it's) a hard-hitting, though provoking drama that's as intense as a playoff hockey game."

-Halifax Chronicle Herald

The Brothers Grimm (2001)

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In 1999, The Canadian Opera Company and Nicholas Goldschmidt's Music Canada 2000 Inc. commissioned Burry to write a new opera for the COC's Ensemble Studio School Tour. The resulting work, The Brothers Grimm, has been performed for over 90,000 school children and adults across Canada and passed its 300th performance mark in Fall 2007. It is believed to be the most performed Canadian opera in history. Excerpts from the opera have been performed with full orchestra at the Altamira Summer Opera Concerts, The World Summit on Arts and Culture in Ottawa, and broadcast nationally on CBC's Sunday Afternoon at the Opera. The opera was recently recorded by the COC and has received productions at Opera Lyra Ottawa, Manitoba Opera, Saskatoon Opera, Calgary Opera and Opera Nuova in Edmonton, AB.

The format of the 45-minute touring opera greatly appeals to Burry as he feels that it is not only a wonderful introduction for new opera audiences, but presents a tight and concentrated medium for storytelling. The composer is currently working on two more operas that follow the form: The Vinland Traveller and Isis and the Seven Scorpions and is continuing with a new opera based on another Grimm tale: The Bremen Town Musicians.

Listen: Little Red Cap, from The Brothers Grimm

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"There are whole collections of adults that you couldn't get to sit still for an hour to watch an operatic production, and so the greatest testament to the success of Dean Burry's new kids opera. was the rapt attention it received from the 100 or so children neatly arrayed on the floor. Burry's opera is quite confident in its theatricality."

-Robert Harris, The Globe and Mail

"Burry ingeniously intersperses sung sections with spoken dialogue, making it more accessible to children unfamiliar with the operatic idiom. The vocal writing is typically "modern-operatic" without being difficult or alienating, expertly woven to plenty of stage business, a must if you want to capture an audience raised on TV, video games and action movies. On this occasion, the several dozen kids sat on the floor, transfixed at the happenings onstage throughout with very little fidgeting Ñ a very good sign!"

-Joseph So, La Scena Musicale

" What a fabulous piece! It grabbed the attention of the entire audience from young to small. There was of course beautiful music but also wonderful drama and lots of humour. We were enchanted!"

-Kathy Reid, Arts Coordinator, Brant County District School Board.

Anne's Tea Party (2000)

Believe it or not, Burry's only example of "Tea Theatre". Anne's Tea Party, an original story using L.M. Montegomery's characters, was performed with high tea in a Victorian tearoom built expressly for the show. The cucumber sandwiches were divine.

Rainbow Valley (2000)

The second of Burry's L.M Montegomery collaborations with playwright Hank Stinson, Rainbow Valley was commissioned as a follow-up to the success of Emily of New Moon. The work was premiered in the winter of 2000 and went on to a 140-show run at the island's Avonlea Village historical attraction. Portions of the work were later presented in Stinson's 2002 Charlottetown Festival revue Songs of the Island.


I Was Loved (The Mary Pickford Story) (1998)

I Was Loved is based on the life and career of silent film star Mary Pickford. Born Gladys Smith in Toronto in 1892, Mary Pickford is one of Canada's little known national treasures. Known as "America's Sweetheart" she was the first film actor ever to negotiate a million-dollar contract and was one of the film industry's most important pioneers. Along with Charlie Chaplin and Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford helped create the now famous United Artists Studios. I Was Loved stakes a claim on Mary Pickford as a Canadian, feminist and pioneer. Through scenes and songs of public and private life, Mary's experience is revealed as the epitome of a society in change in the early years of the Twentieth Century.

The early decades of Hollywood were a one-woman show. In I Was Loved, Mary Pickford's life unfolds through an exciting whirlwind of failures and triumphs, lovers and rivals, family and career, all illuminated by the toe tapping, witty and touching music inspired by ragtime and tin-pan alley favourites.

The musical received at workshop production in Sheridan College's Studio Theatre in May 1998, but has yet to receive a staged production.

Emily of New Moon: A Children's Musical (1998)

Lucy Maude Montegomery's 1923 novel Emily of New Moon was adapted for the stage by Hank Stinson with music by Dean Burry and was presented throughout the summer of 1998 at Charlottetown's historic Beaconsfield House. Portions of the work were later presented in Stinson's 2002 Charlottetown Festival revue Songs of the Island.

Under the Night (1996)

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Part supernatural thriller, part love story.

A newborn baby's cry pierces the night. Two babies are born; one in 16th century Romania, the other in modern day North America. An old gypsy fortuneteller sings of the curse of the werewolf: he is condemned to kill the one he loves.

A young man, whose mother died giving birth to him, and whose father will never forgive him for it, finds himself escaping into a fantasy world of werewolves. But then he meets and falls in love with the girl of his dreams. A death in a Romanian forest and another on a modern day campus drive him to the point where he can no longer tell the difference between the real world and the one he's imagined.

The music of Under the Night is a dynamic blend of Broadway-style show tunes, contemporary pop songs and traditional gypsy folk idioms. The story for the "werewolf musical" was derived from a play that Burry wrote in 1988 entitled When the Wolf Cries. The conflicted nature of the werewolf character has always fascinated the composer, and this musical presents various points of view on the myth: the religious, the popular and the psychological.

"...the story flows with suspense to its surprising conclusion...Rhindress' script and Burry's music and lyrics provide a show that is well balanced in both dialogue and song...a gripping tale and stirring songs"

-Dale Fawthrop, The Sackville Tribune Post, Sackville, NB

Shanawdithit (1996)

Shanawdithit is an opera based on the true story of the last Beothuk Indian of Newfoundland, who died in 1827. Scene One, which takes place in April 1823, deals with the capture of Shanawdithit, her mother (Doodebeshat) and her sister (Emamooset). The beginning of the scene sees a lone fisherman, William Cull, who is trapping furs in the off-season. After a quiet orchestral prelude, he sings a lively but ominous aria about the difficulties of winter and the pleasure of finally seeing the arrival of spring. Hearing something approaching in the forest, he hides to observe three starving Indian women enter the clearing. The sing a trio, praying to nature and mourning lost comforts. Emamooset is dying of tuberculosis and Shanawdithit, the youngest, asks, " Why do we walk into the arms of Buggishaman (white man). They will only kill us!" In a solo, contemplative moment, Doodebeshat despairs at her daughter's loss of faith and pleads that they may somehow find the strength to go on. Shanawdithit, embarrassed at her own selfishness, apologises to her mother, followed by a duet in which Shanawdithit is convinced of the importance of hope. However, hope is lost when the heartless Cull pounces upon them with his musket primed. Instead of killing them, he remembers the reward offered by the king for the capture of live Indians and sings an evil dance of fortunes to come. As he is leading them off, however, the father of Shanawdithit, Mamjaesdoo, bursts forth from the forest, ordering Cull to leave them. Tensions ensue and the Beothuk man is shot dead by one of Cull's men. The scene ends as the women are led off, the fate of their race now unavoidable.

Shanawdithit incorporates some of the limited vocabulary recorded before the demise of the Beothuk nation and musically is a blend of contemporary atonality and traditional English folk idioms. A concert version of the opera, directed by Michael Albano, was presented in Walter Hall at the University of Toronto in March 1996.

Unto the Earth: Vignettes of a War (1993)

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Written while Burry was a student at Mount Allison University in Sackville, NB, Unto the Earth tells the story of two Newfoundland soldiers and their wives during the First World War. On July 1, 1916, over 800 members of the Royal Newfoundland Regiment went "over the top" at Beaumont Hamel in France. The next morning only 69 answered role call. This was a devastating loss for the small island colony, then known as The Dominion of Newfoundland.

In addition to the overseas conflict, the opera deals with the war at home and the effects of losing so many fathers, brothers and sons. The music is contemporary, yet tuneful and the duet "Where are they?" was broadcast nationally on CBC Radio as part of Memorial Day programming in November 1992.

"The music, written by Dean Burry for singers and orchestra is quite remarkable. This third year student who last year gave us Joe and Mary Had a Baby has again created a thoroughly enjoyable and entertaining piece of musical drama... "We are soldiers" is a song which has come back to haunt me all day with its rich textures and thickness and the song the women sing after their husband leaves captures the feelings that are not explicable with words."

-N. Lenco, Argosy Weekly, Sackville, NB

Joe and Mary Had A Baby... (1992)

Burry's first major musical-dramatic work, Joe and Mary Had a Baby is a modern, semi-religious retelling of the Nativity story. A student theatre group was founded to mount the production and selling advertising space in the program provided funding. The experience of Joe and Mary taught the composer of the great demands required to create musical theatre while engendering a passionate love of the musical stage.

"The music featured several of those ever-so-important "hummable" tunes, and some really touching love songs...the composition was outstanding. It was a performance that brought the house down and the audience to its feet. As for Dean Burry, I think his star will climb high. Some day...when his musicals are running in Toronto, London, Paris and New York, I'll be able to tell my grandchildren that I saw the premier performance of his very first musical: Joe and Mary Had a Baby."

-Becky Coleman, Argosy Weekly