Opera
Widow's peak
Rodney Milnes
If you are going to do classical operetta, then you must take it as seriously as if it were by Mozart, and the production team at the Coliseum has been richly rewarded in paying this compliment to The Merry Widow. Lehar can take it. Producer John Cox has retranslated Leon's and Stein's text, including on the way some delightfully suggestive double entendres, and tidied up one or two of Christopher Hassall's lyrics (though not those, alas, for ' Lippen schweigen ' or Danilo's entrance song, which still sound as precious as 1840s' photographs). He and his cast have also taken great pains with the long stretches of dialogue — always a danger point when opera companies let their hair down — and in this department they have, I think, set new standards.
By refusing to package the Widow in spurious romanticism for the Carry On Schmaitzing public, by avoiding production numbers where none are called for (at the end of Act 1 for instance), the company has revealed the genuinely romantic bones of the work. There are few more romantic situations than that of two people deeply in love yet going to any lengths, however cruel, to avoid admitting it. The nearest they come to honesty here is in an apparently artless song (a trump card in opera comique — what cannot be spoken can, perhaps, be risked in song): the widow in Villa ' and Danilo in his 'Royal Children' ballad in the finale to Act 2, and Cox emphasises the significance of this pattern by using children as props in each instance.
The anit-schmaltz tone is proposed at their first meeting. She the bankrupt farmer's daughter kicking her shoes off and chewing a cold lamb cutlet, he the rustic aristocrat, a sort of sketch for Hofmannsthal's Mandryka, awakened from a 'fearful hangover in similar undress — the stage is set for this Beatrice and Benedick battle of wits. Lorna Haywood and John Wakefield carry it off brilliantly. Miss Haywood sings the role exquisitely. She is dressed, quite rightly, in black throughout, and lacks only the height to carry it off with total success, which is scarcely her fault, and although robustly spirited, throughout she has a slight tendency to look sulky when I think she is trying to look 'sultry. Romantic male leads are far more difficult to find, and the casting of John Wakefield is something of a master-stroke. To describe him as a matinee idol would be unfair; to judge from the number of swooning females encountered in the interval — one of whom, I fear, mouthed the word 'charisma' — his rugged charm would grow more dangerous as the day drew on. This is a real star performance.
Ann Hood and John Brecknock sing the more conventional lovers' music sweetly, and Miss Hood, with the best pair of legs in opera, comes into her own in the last act with high kicks and cartwheels. Keith Bonnington is unobtrusively excellent in the tricky speaking role of the embassy clerk, and there is a moment of hilarious Off-beat comedy from Barbara Walker as one of the erring embassy wives.
I should hate to give the impression that there is anything austere about the Presentation. When high spirits are needed they are there: in a sparkling ' Weiber ' septet, and in an Act 3 that is riot from the word go. Elisabeth Dalton's costumes are pretty, flattering and funny all at the same time, and her set for chez Maxim a Miracle of wit. And I like her notion of dressing the grisettes as flowers so that Dana°, masked as a bee, can buzz lasciviously around their stamens. Conductor Henry Krips is a little heavyhanded, with the music, spinning his rubato to dangerous lengths and revelling in Lehar's superb orchestration at the expense Of the words. But the Coliseum is on a Winning streak this season, and this new Show enhances it.
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