100 YEARS OLD AND STILL POPPING INTO OPERAS...
THE Royal Opera House is royally opulent; Glyndebourne is glorious; the English National Opera is enchanting, but there is a great deal to be said for going to an opera at smaller, less snazzy venues, as two of my recent musical experiences have confirmed.
The first of these was Pop-Up Opera’s Hansel And Gretel which I saw at the V&A Museum of Childhood in Bethnal Green. I have never been disappointed by Pop-Up’s productions, for they seem to have the knack of picking up the very best of our young singers straight out of music schools and their shows always bristle with inventiveness and humour.
Hansel And Gretel by Engelbert Humperdinck (the German composer who lived from 1854-1921, not the pop singer who for some inexplicable reason appropriated his name) fits the Pop-Up ethos perfectly and makes for a glorious five-star musical pantomime.
The singing, especially that of Polly Leech and Sofia Larsson in the title roles, was divine, the acting excellent, the witch (Ailsa Mainwaring) really scary, the rudimentary sets (especially the gingerbread cottage) delightfully silly and the captions (which started as direct translation of the German but added typical Pop-Up humour as the story progressed) sillier still.
Every time I have seen Pop-Up (and I am rapidly running out of fingers to count them on) they have exceeded expectations and considering how skyhigh my expectations have risen, this is a remarkable achievement.
Even if you have never been to an opera before (in fact, particularly if you have never been to an opera before) I can heartily recommend popupopera.co.uk to see where PopUp’s Hansel And Gretel is popping up next. Wherever you see it, this will be the best pantomime in town.
The day after I saw Pop-Up in Bethnal Green, I dropped in to the King’s Head Theatre, at the pub of the same name in Islington for their new production of Tosca.
The singing and acting in general did not quite reach the impossible heights of Pop-Up, except for Polish baritone Przemyslaw Baranek, whose portrayal of police chief Scarpia (always my favourite operatic villain) was superbly cold and even scarier than the witch the day before. Any slight deficiency in the singing, however, was made up for by the success of this new production.
Puccini’s Tosca is set at the time of the Battle of Marengo with Napoleon’s army marching on Rome. The King’s Head production, however, transplants it to Paris during the Second World War with Scarpia portrayed as a Nazi governor rather than a police chief.
I have seen many attempts to update operas by changing their country and time period and most of the time this simply does not work. Anachronisms such as sub-machine guns in the middle-ages simply spoil the story.
For Tosca at the King’s Head, however, the production simply swapped one country under occupation for another and the transition worked surprisingly well. It’s on at the King’s Head (kingsheadtheatre.com) until October 28 and is well worth seeing.