Stage Director Matthew Bissett

While Matthew has been involved in plays and musicals from the age of five, his career on the operatic stage started in 1992, when he joined the Pacific Opera Victoria chorus for the company's productions of Verdi's Un Ballo In Maschera, Puccini's La Boheme and Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore. After graduating from the University of Victoria with a Bachelor of Fine Arts degree in Theatre, with a specialization in Directing, he returned to Pacific Opera. There he worked on six different productions from 1995 to 1997, as their resident assistant director. He moved to Vancouver in 1997 to start Epicentre Theatre, a company dedicated to producing new or little-known Canadian plays. Projects included Vancouver premieres of plays by Sean Dixon and Daniel MacIvor, and an ongoing relationship with Toronto playwright George F. Walker, re-mounting three of his earliest plays in new, re-written versions. Matthew returned to the opera world in 2002, when he started his relationship with Burnaby Lyric Opera by directing Rossini's Cinderella. He then went on to direct their very successful productions of Rossini's The Barber of Seville and Donizetti's The Elixir of Love. Matthew also works as a director for the Vancouver Academy of Music, directing many different scene studies as well as their fully-staged productions of Offenbach's The Tales of Hoffmann and Weill's Street Scene.

 

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