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In the summer of 2011, in the main hall of the ramshackle Tranzac Club in downtown Toronto, patrons milled about with pints in hand, talking and laughing in a languid humour, ready to enjoy some Puccini.

This was not the sober climate one expects of a performance ofLa bohème.Programmes circulated in mocked-up newspapers bearing headlines about soaring rents. Instead of reserved boxes and balconies, seating was cabaret-style: first-come, first-served. And smartphones were not only permitted — they were encouraged. There wasn’t a cummerbund or monocle in sight.

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It was not that kind of opera.It wasopera in a bar: four words whose irresistible intrigue would define Against the Grain Theatre long after their wildly auspicious debut. The beer-soaked libretto was sold out every night of its run.

“You didn’t have to pretend to be anything. You could be relaxed.” This is Joel Ivany, artistic director of Against the Grain and the creative radical behind the original barroomBohème. “You could not just drink beer but spill the beer while drinking it and that would have been okay. It was really, really fun,” he recalls to me this week from Toronto, where Against the Grain’s latest production, a reimagining of Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 18th centuryazione teatraleclassicOrfeo ed Euridice, is set to open for a three-night run at the Fleck Dance Theatre on the waterfront beginning Thursday evening. HisOrphéeembodies, likeLa bohèmebefore it, the attitude that has distinguished Against the Grain from the start: an impulse to “break down preconceptions” of opera in 2018 — to “shake up and revitalize the art.”