8 hours ago
17
Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus must have done more for champagne sales than any other operetta. A good production, however, demands plenty of onstage fizz too, but the bubbles start to rise rather late in the day in Opera Holland Park’s new staging.
Director and choreographer Liam Steel uses the Metropolitan Opera’s 2013 revamped English version with lyrics by Jeremy Sams and a new book by Douglas Carter Beane. His chosen setting, however, is London on New Year’s Eve 1929; cue references to the Sitwells and the Mitfords. In its determination to reflect the anything goes spirit of the age there’s even a cheeky reference to Winston Churchill’s supposed dalliance with Ivor Novello (how did he find it? “Musical,” goes the apocryphal tale.) The idea has legs, turning a 19th-century Viennese operetta into a louche Noël Coward farce with lines that are at times deliciously tart.
Where it is less successful is in the playing out of this frothy saga of bourgeois infidelity and mistaken identities. With its free-standing doorframes, Neil Irish’s set for the Eisensteins’ salon feels insufficiently nouveau riche. Placed in front of the orchestra on the OHP forestage, it does at least allow the performers intimate contact with the audience. The second act’s deco ballroom with gilded Degas centrepiece has more flourish, but, confined to the rear of the stage, the company feels deflatingly distant. It’s left to act three, set in a police station complete with affable moustachioed bobby (a winning performance by Robert Burt), to raise the chuckle level to where it needs to be.
Steel does his best, pulling off some nice bits of physical comedy, and Sams’ elegant lyrics are a treat: “Drink another drink with me, you’ve had none and I’ve had three,” sings the libidinous tenor, Alfred (a stentorian and suitably Italianate Xavier Heterington). The acting can be inconsistent – act one starts off a little Acorn Antiques – but there are strong performances from Rebecca Bottone as the put-upon cockney chambermaid Adele and Julien Van Mellaerts as an affected Dr Falke in midnight-blue velvet and foppish earring. Matthew Siveter plays Inspector Frank as a bluff Yorkshireman with a fine line in bewildered expressions. His encounter at the ball with Thomas Atkins’ Eisenstein, where both appear as faux-Frenchmen and communicate entirely in phrases such as “coq au vin” and “menage a trois”, earns well-deserved laughter.
George Jackson conducts the City of London Sinfonia stylishly, though the music is frequently too loud for the singers. Nevertheless, there are strong vocal performances from Alison Langer as Rosalinde, Clare Presland as the gender-fluid socialite Orlofsky and especially Bottone, who absolutely nails her Laughing Song. Special mention too for Olivia Carrell who sparkles in the relatively thankless role of Ida, the chorus girl from Where’s My Willie.
