CP Enetertainment Editor

TORONTO – More over base fans. Make room for the elephants and the camels, a cast of 1,200 singers and an orchestra of 100 plus.

Opera is coming to the new Sky Dome, home of the Toronto Blue Jays, on a grand, grand scale – at least in terms of size and numbers.

Verdi’s Aida, created for the 1871 opening of the Suez Canal and first performed in the Cairo Opera House, will play the Sky Dome Oct 26 and 28 possibly before the largest audience in its North American tour.

Certainly it will be the largest production ever stage in Toronto, with capacity for 39,000 tickets-boulders at each performance.

The stadium seats about 48,000 at baseball games and a couple more part of the vast seating space will be curtained off to improve the acoustic.

Tickets prices will range from $35 to $125 with a limited number of seats at $150.

Aside from the singers, musicians and technical crew of 200 there will be 35 animals –including lions, tigers, leopards, horses, doves and a python – on the 3,000 square/ metre stage with pros that include a 14 metre high Sphinx. Verdi’s story of a doomed love between Radames, a captain of the Egyptian guard, and Aida, the slave-princess, will be mounted by the I

International Opera Festival under the direction of the Italian-born Giuseppe Raffa.

The title role will be sung by Grace Bumbry, a native of St. Louis, who made her operatic debut at the Paris Opera in 1960.

She sang Aida when it was originally mounted by the International Opera Festival against the backdrop of the real Sphinx and pyramids in Giza, Egypt in 1987, and again later in Melbourne, Australia and Vancouver.

Raffa said at a SkyDome news conference Monday the theme of Opera for the people – which is the way it began – is the driving force behind the International Opera Festival operations of Carmen and Turandot.

“ Opera was never meant to be a form of severe spiritual torture “he said nothing that 71,000 spectators who attended the two Aida performances at Olympic Stadium in Montreal in June 1988, about 85 per cent were attending opera for the first time.