Glyndebourne’s The Merry Widow is a high-octane comedy — review

There was a brilliantly funny scene in the National Theatre’s One Man, Two Guvnors in which James Corden played a man with two jobs fighting with himself. It started with a slap on his own cheek, then a wrestling scene for one, and finally he hit himself over the head with a dustbin lid.

That may not seem to have much to do with The Merry Widow, but the National Theatre comedy and Glyndebourne’s new production of Lehár’s operetta share the same director in Cal McCrystal. When he is in charge, expect high jinks, pratfalls and slapstick.

One sympathises with the challenge facing the director of any classic Viennese operetta. The music may be beautiful, especially when the composer is Lehár, who could not help turning every tune to gold, but the plots are wafer-thin and the comedy is, shall we say, dated.

The recent history of The Merry Widow is littered with productions coarse and/or clumsily updated that have sunk without trace. It seems unlikely that Glyndebourne’s will go the same way: it looks lavish in a way that manages to be both dusty operetta and garish pantomime and, like everything else about this production, does it with in-your-face self-confidence.

A lot of McCrystal’s gags are fun, but he does not know when to stop. Danilo’s image as the romantic lead is undercut from the off, when he makes his entrance tumbling down a flight of stairs and spends the next five minutes in a Chaplinesque silent comedy routine as the bellboy tries to pick him up. Later on, it is criminal to upstage one of the finest numbers Lehár ever wrote with a cheap jape about the summer house being pushed on from the wrong side, and the ensuing shadow-play with Camille energetically making love to a female mannequin, while hilariously funny, belongs in a different kind of show altogether.

All this is too much and it comes as a relief when the principal players are left in peace to explore the romance at the opera’s heart.

The production is lucky to have Danielle de Niese, bright-eyed and charismatic, in the title role. It would be nice to have more voice from her — “Vilja”, her big number, is chopped into short phrases and rather effortful, as if she has not been doing much serious singing of late (and wasn’t it transposed down a tone?) — but her youthful energy radiates a feelgood glow. As star of the show, she purloins the big cancan number at Maxim’s from Valencienne.

She is paired with Germán Olvera as a fine Danilo, who imposes with his proud, bronzed baritone, allied to an unusually brooding take on the role, which he turns to great advantage by the end. Soraya Mafi sings sweetly as Valencienne, though she has been encouraged to play the role for laughs. Michael McDermott has been saddled with a stuffed-shirt portrayal of Camille de Rosillon, which does not make sense for the young French lover, and sings with little Viennese whipped-cream seduction in his dry tenor.

The show is launched by Tom Edden turning Njegus into a camp but entertaining stand-up comic and he also gets to sing his aria, added by Lehár for London in 1907. Best of the rest is the inimitable Thomas Allen as Baron Zeta, at 79 a master of the sparkling, light touch that would have been appreciated everywhere else.

The music is in the expert hands of John Wilson, who entices the London Philharmonic Orchestra to some effervescent playing. The opera is sung in a new English version by Stephen Plaice and Marcia Bellamy, pepped up, one imagines, with added puns and double entendres by McCrystal.

In the end, the real Merry Widow cannot be found here. It has been usurped by a high-octane comedy show, more McCrystal than Lehár, but very slick and giving 120 per cent towards hitting every funny bone in the body. This audience loved it, which is possibly recommendation enough.

★★★★☆

To July 28, glyndebourne.com