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Times
16-07-2025
- Entertainment
- Times
That Bastard, Puccini! review — music, mischief and silky wit
You can't sit through James Inverne's engagingly dotty chamber play about operatic rivalry without thinking of Amadeus. Here we are, back on the faultline that separates talent from genius, this time with Leoncavallo and Puccini competing to see who can write the better version of La bohème. What makes this nimble production at the Park Theatre in London so seductive is that the tale of ambition and skulduggery is drenched in cleverly weighted meta asides. Inverne, a former editor of Gramophone whose debut play, A Walk with Mr Heifetz, ran off-Broadway in 2018, wraps his research in layers of humour and self-referential nods and winks. And at the heart of it all is a winningly mischievous performance by Sebastien Torkia as a Puccini who is a suave wheeler-dealer and womaniser. It's not so long since I saw Torkia bring an ever-grinning facsimile of Silvio Berlusconi to life in a bio-musical of that corrupt old rogue. This year he played both Professor Van Helsing and a simpering Mina Harker in the rumbustious vampire farce Dracula, A Comedy of Terrors. He is a silky comic force. • Read more theatre reviews, guides and interviews We first see his boulevardier eavesdropping on poor Leoncavallo (Alasdair Buchan) and his ever-supportive wife, Berthe (Lisa-Anne Wood). Dogged by fears that he is destined to be a one-hit wonder, the composer of Pagliacci is outraged that the man he thinks of as a friend is muscling in on his plans to bring Henri Murger's stories of wayward Parisian bohos to the stage. Puccini denies stealing the idea, of course, and as their feud bubbles away, he feels free to lecture his rival on the meaning of creativity. Inverne allows his characters to catch each other using language drawn from the psychobabble of our own day. Buchan's mournful, dishevelled Leoncavallo always wins our sympathy, and there are even moments when he seems close to grabbing the glory at Venice's La Fenice. Wood is kept busy too, singing the occasional aria, transforming herself into Puccini's formidable wife, Elvira, and even joining Gorka in delivering a hilarious impersonation of a pernicketty Gustav Mahler who, as Vienna's leading conductor, wields godlike power over the two Italians. Could the sewing up of loose ends in the final 20 minutes have been tighter? Perhaps. Still, the director Daniel Slater, a familiar face on the opera circuit, administers it all with a light touch. Carly Brownbridge's handsome set smuggles musical notation onto the floor. In this quirky realm, a chaise longue can become a gondola.★★★★☆120minPark Theatre, London, to Aug 9, @timesculture to read the latest reviews
The Guardian
24-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
The Capulets and the Montagues review – stylish staging sees ETO's Bellini go gangster
An attempt at brokering peace between warring factions is made in a tense call from a phonebox to a bar where men crowd around the beige receiver. The look: double-breasted suits and Brylcreem for one gang, brown leather and rollnecks for the other. Fedoras for all. As the curtain falls on act one, a man lights a Molotov cocktail and raises his arm to lob it into enemy property. Poison comes in mini liqueur bottles. The heroine has a serving hatch, not a balcony. Forget Verona. Even without directorial input, Bellini's Romeo and Juliet opera has long been a red rag to purists, riffing as it does on Shakespeare's play via multiple Italian sources. Produced in six weeks to plug a gap in the roster at Venice's La Fenice after another composer failed to deliver, this opera-against-the-odds has never matched the popularity of Bellini's La Sonnambula or Norma. Eloise Lally's mid-century Little Italy update for English Touring Opera is energetic and stylish. Its small box set sees a bar interior – formica tables, sauce bottles, Venetian blinds – become a subtly lit ruin after the Molotov incident. Staging Romeo's conference with the Capuleti (the production is sung in Italian) as a call via a gangster hotline is genuinely effective. So is the transformation of the Montecchi attack on the Capuleti into a slow-motion brawl in the latter's dingy, linoleum-floored bar, even if Romeo's attempt to crash Giulietta's wedding in 'disguise' – swapping slimline burgundy tailoring for an oversized pinstriped number – stretched the production's internal rules about visual realism. It was a shame the subtlety of the production wasn't matched in the pit, where a heater nestled between musicians suggested that playing conditions weren't ideal. Under conductor Alphonse Cemin, ETO's pared-down orchestra sounded threadbare at times, the strings in act one far from the bel canto lushness demanded by the score. Elsewhere there were tuning problems. Crucially, despite a few carefully sculpted woodwind solos, more overall shape and direction was needed from the podium as well as more attention to balance. The singing was classier. The tiny male chorus did sterling work, while Timothy Nelson was a stentorian patriarch and Masimba Ushe a warm, sympathetic Lorenzo. Brenton Spiteri's Tebaldo was endlessly ardent, though lacked the smooth line invited by Bellini's famously long melodies. No such problem with Samantha Price or Jessica Cale as the star-cross'd lovers: the chemistry they alas lacked physically – why not do more with a trouser-role Romeo in 1950s NYC? – was sumptuously compensated in vocal terms. Price's burnished mezzo worked wonders with Bellini's lyricism, her coloratura finely delineated. Cale had the biggest voice of all, powerfully communicative but beautifully controlled in intimate moments. In a production that conjures perma-violence, Cale's Giulietta is a force to be reckoned with. On tour until 26 April.
