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Lehár: The Merry Widow - Alex Otterburn, Henry Waddington - Scottish Opera (Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic) |
Reviewed 19 June 2025
Scottish Opera brings its New York Mafia Merry Widow to Opera Holland Park in a production where the two principals shine despite distractions and overdone comedy
Viennese operetta was written as escapism, usually based on boulevard comedies with plenty of mistaken identity and pretence, settings were largely exotic. in 1905, librettists Viktor Léon and Leo Stein turned to Henri Meilhac's 1861 comic play L'attaché d'ambassade, to create Die lustige Witwe. They transferred the action to Paris, moving the protagonists' native land to the exotic Montenegro, introducing extra plot involving the baron's wife and transferring the last act to the chic Parisian restaurant of Maxim's. The result seemed to have all the ingredients required for an operetta.
Hungarian composer Franz Lehár wrote music that was inflected by these Parisian and Balkan settings, yet his treatment of the opera's two couples, Hanna and Danilo, Valencienne and Camille, gives them sentimentally touching music that makes their emotional journey's believable. Die lustige Witwe isn't just about comic situations, it is about people, yet these four are surrounded by a welter of determinedly comic, stock characters, and that is the challenge when it comes to bringing the operetta alive on today's stage.
It is tempting to wonder what the original production was like (the original Hanna, Mitzi Günther did in fact record parts of the opera and you can hear her Viljalied on YouTube). Now, I expect that we would find the original tedious and hardly escapism, after all neither Paris nor Montenegro has the same exoticism. ENO has had two goes at getting the piece right in recent decades, neither the John Copley production in 2008 [see my review], nor the Max Webster one in 2019 [see my review] seem to have stuck, though both got some things right. Graham Vick directed it at the Shaftesbury Theatre for the Royal Opera in 1997, an experiment that seems never to have been repeated. At Glyndebourne last year (I only saw the production on video), Cal McCrystal brought his familiar style to the work, keeping the original setting yet overegging the drama.
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Lehár: The Merry Widow - Paula Sides - Scottish Opera (Photo: Mihaela Bodlovic) |
Scottish Opera, Opera Holland Park and D'Oyly Carte Opera Company have collaborated on a new production of Franz Lehár's The Merry Widow in what was presumably hoped were the safe hands of director John Savournin. Savournin with David Eaton founded Charles Court Opera and have long experience in this game, whilst Savournin and his company have collaborated with Opera Holland Park on a series of Gilbert & Sullivan stagings. For this production Savournin and Eaton produced a new English version.
Having toured the production for Scottish Opera earlier this year [see the review in The Stage]. The cast, the Scottish Opera Orchestra and Chorus, and conductor Stuart Stratford came to Opera Holland Park. We caught the first performance at Opera Holland Park on 19 June 2025. The cast was led by Paula Sides as Hanna and Alex Otterburn as Danilo, with Rhian Lois as Valencienne, William Morgan as Camille, and Henry Waddington as Zeta. Designs were by takis, with lighting by Ben Pickersgill and choreography by Kally Lloyd-Jones.
Savournin (book) and Eaton (lyrics) had the idea to transpose their new English version to Italian-American Mafiosi in New York, with Hanna's fortune coming from Sicily, so that the second act moved to Sicily, whilst Maxim's was relocated to New York. In an article in the programme book, John Savournin argued cohesively for the new setting, which does make sense intellectually. Unfortunately, the relocation creates dramaturgical and emotional problems.