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The Guardian
15-05-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Trial by Jury/A Matter of Misconduct! review – gags and Spads in Scottish Opera's sparkling double bill
Ten years after conductor Stuart Stratford left Opera Holland Park to begin a stabilising and fruitful relationship as Scottish Opera's music director, the traffic this summer is in the other direction in a trio of co-productions, originating in Scotland, with D'Oyly Carte Opera a third partner. As John Savournin's broad and brassy The Merry Widow tours across Scotland before its London transfer, this new double bill adds a 150th anniversary revival of Gilbert and Sullivan's first success and a contemporary political satire to a colourful package. Savournin also directs Trial By Jury, which swaps the courtroom for a TV studio in a sparkling update that is more Jerry Springer than Judge Judy. Patter-song master Richard Suart is The Learned Judge – who eventually gets the girl, jilted bride Angelina (soprano Kira Kaplan) – and company favourite Jamie MacDougall is on his best camp form as the Defendant, Edwin. Kally Lloyd-Jones gives the Bridesmaids, led by Amy J Payne, some laugh-out-loud geriatric cheerleader choreography to complement their outrageous frocks, and the jurors' diverse costuming runs the gamut from lab coat and dress kilt to TV-am sweater and perm. Edward Jowle (as Floor Manager/Usher) is one of a quartet of young singers on the company's Emerging Artists programme given the chance to shine in both shows. In the pit, Toby Hession conducts a swaggering account of Sullivan's music; Hession is also the composer of the double bill's new operetta set in the press room at No 9 Downing Street. His score also owes debts to Sondheim and John Adams and plays with its heritage stylishly in Laura Attridge's production. Hession and librettist Emma Jenkins have been nurtured through short pieces for Scottish Opera's small-scale touring and A Matter of Misconduct! is a sophisticated extension of those projects, with baritone Ross Cumming as ambitious politician Roger Penistone (fnar, fnar) and mezzo Chloe Harris his wife, Cherry, a would-be wellness guru (or 'Poundshop Paltrow'). There are gags aplenty at the expense of politicians in Westminster and Holyrood, and possibly the first operatic rhyming of both 'vaginal dryness' and 'clitoral stimulator', but this pacy piece also finds room for some stratospheric coloratura from Kaplan as sassy lawyer Sylvia Lawless, and a lovely duet for the rather unlovely central couple. Tenor MacDougall, as Malcolm Tucker-esque Spad, Sandy Hogg, handles the score's trickier music with aplomb. At Theatre Royal, Glasgow, on 16 May. Then at Festival theatre, Edinburgh, on 30 May and 6 June and Opera Holland Park, London, on 24 and 26 June.
Telegraph
01-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
The Merry Widow: Bada bing! Scottish Opera serves up a beautiful production with a dash of The Sopranos
In Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehár's three-act operetta The Merry Widow, Baron Mirko Zeta of the fictional, cash-strapped Balkan state of Pontevedro attempts to manufacture a marriage between his right-hand man Danilo Danilovitch and the titular rich, Pontevedrian widow Hanna Glawari. His purpose is to keep Mrs Glawari's millions in Pontevedro. In this new co-production by Scottish Opera, D'Oyly Carte Opera and Opera Holland Park, the action is relocated to the world of the Italian-American mafia in mid-20th-century New York. The baron is reimagined as mafia boss Don Zeta, who is plotting to get his hands on the extremely valuable lemon plantation of Tennessee-born Hanna Glawari, the recently widowed wife of a boss in the Sicilian Cosa Nostra. This new, English-language adaptation by John Savournin (book) and David Eaton (lyrics) begins in Don Zeta's palatial Manhattan apartment. There we find the mafia boss in good spirits. It's his 50th birthday party, many of his enemies appear to be 'sleeping with the fishes', while others have woken up to find a severed horse's head in their bed. These macabre mafia clichés are, however, conveyed with a light-hearted humour. Savournin and Eaton have created a clever and delightfully silly cross between a commedia dell'arte farce and an episode of The Sopranos. Most of the Don's men are trigger-happy numbskulls, and Camille de Rosillon (the operetta's amorous Frenchman) is recast as a Gallic singer whose American concerts and record contracts owe a very definite debt to his mafia connections. This inspired daftness is conveyed fabulously by a universally impressive cast. The ever excellent bass-baritone Henry Waddington is disarmingly jovial in the role of the greedy and ruthless Don Zeta. Remarkably – given the unarguable nastiness of the protagonists – the adaptation succeeds in achieving the operetta's ultimate ascent into romantic comedy. Soprano Paula Sides (who is, in fact, from Tennessee) plays Glawari with a winning combination of sassiness and glamour. Her gorgeous singing, in Act II, of the lovely aria Vilja creates a moment of improbable beauty in the midst of the prevailing buffoonery. Opposite her, Danilo – who is recast as the Don's consigliere, and sung by the fine baritone Alex Otterburn – makes for an unlikely yet convincing romantic hero. There is more spoken dialogue in the piece (especially in Act I) than you would usually expect in an opera. However, Lehár's bright, colourful score makes its presence felt increasingly, and the Scottish Opera's orchestra delivers it with the required combination of lightness and heft. Designer takis delivers three very distinct and brilliant sets (in Don Zeta's apartment, Glawari's Sicilian villa and Manhattan nightclub Maxim's). There is no interval between Acts II and III. What we get instead is a set change that is breathtakingly well executed. This bold adaptation makes for a delightful evening's opera. It is one that is bound to impress as it tours around Scotland before a summer run at Opera Holland Park in London.
Scotsman
21-04-2025
- Entertainment
- Scotsman
Scottish Opera's New York Mafia take on The Merry Widow
Scottish Opera's new co-production of The Merry Widow is set in a New York Mafia family, but all the core elements remain, director John Savournin tells Ken Walton Sign up to our Arts and Culture newsletter, get the latest news and reviews from our specialist arts writers Sign up Thank you for signing up! Did you know with a Digital Subscription to The Scotsman, you can get unlimited access to the website including our premium content, as well as benefiting from fewer ads, loyalty rewards and much more. Learn More Sorry, there seem to be some issues. Please try again later. Submitting... There are certain operas you mess with at your peril. They tend to be the untouchable old favourites, and few come more sacred than those breezy 19th/early 20th century operettas adored for their fun, frivolity, flouncy ballroom dresses and fetching ditties. So, is Sheffield-born stage director John Savournin playing with fire by 're-envisioning' Franz Lehár's exotic 1905 European high society farce The Merry Widow as a Mafia affair set in 1950s New York? Scottish Opera audiences are about to discover for themselves when this audacious new co-production with D'Oyly Carte Opera and Opera Holland Park – performed in a promisingly edgy English translation by Savournin and his co-writer and long-time collaborator David Eaton – launches at the end of April. 'The Mafia high life and its grim underworld have given us a really playful hook to re-explore the comedic elements,' he says. Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad 'That's a very rich world to parody,' he adds. 'The comparison, the fidelity if you like, with Lehár's world [in which the subversive pursuit of money gets dangerously entangled with matters of the heart] is actually quite close. Also, the character stakes are raised because this Merry Widow is not just about avoiding scandal; it's about that scandal, if discovered, becoming a matter of life or death.' Thus the scheming Baron Zeta becomes Don Zeta, around whom a cast straight out of The Godfather are subject to offers they presumably can't refuse. Paula Sides with director John Savournin in rehearsals for The Merry Widow | Julie Howden Whatever greets us over the coming weeks, be assured of an immersive night at the theatre. 'Opera is fundamentally that,' insists Savournin, whose parents' obsession with the amateur operetta circuit led to his own childhood decision to pursue a singer/director life in what he more generically terms musical theatre. 'At home with friends we put on semi-staged concerts and wrote terrible music,' he recalls. As an 11-year-old he sang the role of the Judge in Gilbert & Sullivan's Trial by Jury in nearby Buxton. While training as an opera singer at Trinity College London he 'had a hankering' to stage Sullivan's Cox and Box. 'That's where I met [répétiteur/music director] David Eaton, and we spoke about forming our own company – Charles Court Opera was born'. Twenty years on, it continues to thrive on a mixed diet of G&S, newly commissioned chamber opera and lashings of education and outreach activity. Among its seasonal 'Boutique Pantos' was last Christmas's unlikely hit comedy, Napoleon: Un Petit Pantomime. Savournin previously directed a Scottish Opera Highlights Tour, and sang in its spectacular 2022 production of Golijov's flamenco opera Ainadamar. William Morgan (Camille de Rosillon) and the cast of The Merry Widow in rehearsals | Julie Howden He's back in Scotland, simultaneously directing the company's Trial by Jury, which opens in May as a season-ending double bill with Emma Jenkins' and Toby Hession's newly composed A Matter of Misconduct, altogether forming a summer operetta triptych alongside a Merry Widow he hopes will cut it with everyone from serious opera buffs to the curious uninitiated. 'It's the perfect opera for that, a marvellous balance between comedy and pathos, the full package.' Advertisement Hide Ad Advertisement Hide Ad How far, though, was Savournin prepared to go with his rewrite of the spoken dialogue and Eaton's reworking of the sung lyrics? 'It's important to remember you're doing a version of The Merry Widow and not a totally new play,' he explains. 'I've been careful ensuring the original beat of the story is looked after, that we still take the love story seriously and not disrespect the piece in any way. We're both big believers that you keep a firm eye on the original if you're going to create something new.' And yes, liberties were taken. 'In shifting this to the Mob world the language has to feel it is part of that. Changing how the spoken text sounds gives us that ability to access it better.' Yet, he adds, it remains firmly in the spirit of the genre, linking the late operetta style of Lehár with the MGM musicals heyday of the 1930s and '40s. 'Opera was always a stepping stone towards what musical theatre is now. Theatrically they are fundamentally one and the same. Lehár and G&S play well today because the stories are relatable, the music memorable: that's a big part of operetta's survival technique.' Even when the Mob muscle in...
