Violent kids, bad parents? These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude, at Springboards

By Liz Nicholls, .ca

“These words like daggers enter in mine ears….” Hamlet, III, iv, the Closet Scene

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What happens when you look at the world, and the violence perpetrated by kids, through the lens of their (shocked, or appalled, or ignorant, or in-denial) parents? Actually the team of Lauren Boyd and Michael Clark were responding to Hamlet, and particularly Hamlet’s mom, when they were creating These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude, getting a staged reading directed by David Horak at Workshop West’s Springboards New Play Festival tonight in partnership with the Freewill Shakespeare Festival.

composer Michael Clark, These Words Are Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude, Springboards Festival 2026. Photo supplied.

Gertrude has gotten bad press for more than four centuries — for getting re-married way too soon, and to a murderous usurper to boot, and quite often getting blamed for her son’s revenge quest on behalf of husband #1. But Boyd and Clark, as they explain, weren’t looking to make a musical Hamlet. And David Horak, the Freewill artistic director, who directs the staged reading, didn’t want that either. Boyd, who created the libretto, is an experienced playwright, actor, musical theatre director and producer (her Uniform Theatre production of Cry-Baby, a musical comedy created from the John Waters film, ran at Theatre Network in March). Clark, a composer, musician, and musical director, is the artistic director of the Edmonton Pops Orchestra, which will partner with Freewill on the “Shakespeare-adjacent” Broadway musical comedy Something Rotten!, alternating with Much Ado About Nothing on the Heritage Amphitheatre stage when Freewill returns to Hawrelak Park this summer.

Boyd says she was struck by the book (A Mother’s Reckoning, Living in the Aftermath of Tragedy) by Susan Klebold, the mother of one of the perpetrators of the Columbine High School massacre of 1991. “To what extent is someone aware?” says Boyd of the intriguing question that threads into These Words Like Daggers. “The parents of violent kids: it’s still their child, and she chose to believe her son’s innocence.” Klebold alludes to the mystery she failed to recognize under her watch in her own household.

“It’s easy to say, it’s because of this, or this,” as Boyd says of that kind of violence. “To what extent can a parent’s choices” lead to fatal outcomes. “Is it violent video games? Family tension at home? It’s very tempting to find a silver bullet … and say ‘problem solved’!…. We worked very hard not to identify a single factor.”

They cast temptations aside, and steered away from the specific narrative complications of Hamlet, including the Gertrude’s socio-cultural responsibilities and the culpability of Claudius, the usurper. “We pivoted away from ‘step-father as villain’,” says Boyd. “It’s interesting how often we talk about blame? Why did that happen? Who’s responsible? Who’s to blame? It’s so easy to say ‘it’s because of this. Or this’….” And especially this one, sometimes a question and invariably an accusation: “you didn’t know your own child?”

After all, not everyone who has a crappy step-father is screwed up, or takes up serial killing. “The mental health of young white men” might be one of the great mysteries of our time. “As we started exploring, we found ourselves veering farther and farther away from Hamlet and the (specifics) of Gertrude,” says Boyd.

Don’t be daunted by the idea of opera, albeit ‘chamber opera’, advises Clark. “I do a lot of orchestration, conducting, arranging, and composing. I love musical theatre. I just love telling stories through music!” And he and Boyd chose the opera identifier to distinguish the new piece from the usual “more happy-go-lucky” expectations of musicals. Boyd, who’s directed musicals for the last 13 years, points out that These Words Are Daggers doesn’t quite fit the musical theatre mold, with its ‘I want’ song and its ’11 o’clock number’, etc. It’s more experimental in form, more heightened in emotional stakes, than typical musicals.

So, what kind of music fits the storytelling? Not a question with a simple answer. There are even songs that devolve into “quasi-recitative,” as Clark puts it. The songs “go in an out,” he says. The score is not fully ‘classical,’ it’s “more pop, more rock (but not really “angsty teenagers doing punk rock”)….” He settles on “a mix, very listenable, with moments that are crunchier.”

Similarly, Boyd, the lyricist, who went back to the First Folio Shakespeare text,” says the songs veer away from the verse/ chorus/ bridge formula for pop, “the way most musical theatre is.”  Her lyrics are sometimes iambic pentameter, sometimes free verse, as she describes.

Boyd and Clark aired an early iteration of These Words Like Daggers at the Script Salon staged reading series in December. In this latest development, with a new cast of professionals (seven or eight, including Michael Watt and Larissa Poho) and new collaborators, they’re grateful for “the fantastic opportunity to get this off the ground,” says Clark, who’s been musical director for a number of Straight Edge Theatre productions, including Krampus the Christmas musical.

And now, at Springboards, Edmonton audiences get a sneak peek at a new and contemporary chamber opera, with the composer at the piano and Nicholas Yee on cello, and Shakespeare standing by.

These Words Like Daggers: A Chamber Opera For Gertrude gets a staged reading at Workshop West’s Springboards Festival tonight at The Gateway Theatre.  Tickets (pay-what-you-will): workshopwest.org.