Revenge, like Champagne, is best served cold, so extreme heat may well have been a factor in keeping Opera Holland Park’s new Fledermaus from quite bubbling over on opening night. Dress codes have been relaxed everywhere this season except on stage, and I counted at least two full-length fur coats amongst costume designer Laura Jane Stanfield’s glittering array of Bright Young Things, not to mention all the tweed suits and velvet smoking jackets of her deliciously vivid Beaton-esque vision of New Year’s Eve 1929-style.
But opera singers being one of the select species guaranteed to survive the apocalypse, a bit of weather wasn’t going to put them off. The singing from this ebullient ensemble cast was almost uniformly effervescent. The sheer high-pitched power of Rebecca Bottone’s superbly indignant and wily cockney Adèee will have set the ice rattling in glasses across several postcodes, while Xaiver Hetherington luxuriated in his role as Alfred, the tenor from heaven – or hell, once he finds himself in the cells.
Indeed there were comic delights aplenty in this festival of froth. Thomas Atkins began uncertainly as Eisenstein but really came into his own once disguised as an outrageously accented Frenchman whose conversational opening gambits include the speculative “Défense de fumer…” Matthew Siveter was gorgeous as Frank, the hapless detective whose drunken brush with the BYTs turns him into a sought-after theatrical producer overnight. Alison Langer’s wonderful Roselinde got the best laughs of the night. Not for nothing is she a long-time Holland Park favourite: a voice of great warmth and command, but also a gifted comic actress, one with the ability to galvanise the rest of the cast whenever the pace threatens to sag. Although George Jackson kept the City of London Sinfonia on their toes with some rattling tempi, the spoken dialogue suffered from the sometimes stodgy delivery of an uneven script too dependent on jokes that might have first been cracked in 1929.
There’s not much that can go wrong with a party if you have enough Champagne and director Liam Steel has focused on moving the action from one set piece of silliness to the next, largely letting the story tell itself. Orlofsky’s ball is a triumph. “He used to be a billionaire / She used to be a man,” sings Falke instructively, as he introduces the subjects of his ploy to the Prince’s entourage. Perhaps the mention of “breakfast revelations” dictated the choice that Orlofsky should be one part Liza Minelli to two parts Claudia Winkleman, but it’s a choice that left Clare Presland stranded dramatically in abrasive mode, where guile and command suit her much better vocally. The chorus were fabulous, bringing the party with them. Julien Van Mellaerts’ generous and sensuous baritone made Falke’s “Brother mine and sister mine” the open-hearted centrepiece of this operetta of disguise, transgression and translation.
But as any host or hostess knows, the real secret of a party’s success is in its details, and this is where Steel has given himself an uphill task in making his go with a pop. Strauss’ overture is a long and lovely one and while we’re all interested to see smoke rise from the fingers of the first violins (Jackson’s tempi were bracing from the off) there is ample opportunity for a director to lay out the backstory of Falke’s admittedly ludicrous fancy dress disaster revenge ploy. The appearance of a dancer in half-bat half-boxer shorts is funny for a few bars but quickly turns peculiar, though in keeping with the BYT vibe it is somewhat reminiscent of the Instagram sensation that is @GentlemaninaGasmask.
There is a story being told in the lengthy cavorting around Neil Irish’s drawing room furniture, but its cloudy relationship to Falke’s plan proves a missed opportunity when, in the second half, Falke has to explain it at some length which, if you didn’t know the story already, would have come as a complete surprise. All that business with the bat at the beginning means that whether you know the story or not, it’s a long, hot wait for it to actually start.
