English Touring Opera’s tale of two Italies

Creativity sprouts in many different seedbeds. English Touring Opera’s (ETO) current season puts two wildly different hothouse flowers on display: Leoncavallo’s murderous melodrama Pagliacci, said to have its roots in a real-life court case, and Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, the fruit of a bitter falling-out between the two – surely the epitome of creative tension. But perhaps the most inventive piece on stage last week sprang directly from stony ground: the unforgiving streets of London.

A large, unauditioned cast had been brought together by Streetwise Opera, an award-winning company that aims to enable people who have experienced homelessness to find inspiration and self-confidence while they rebuild their lives and identities. In workshops with director Anna Morrissey, musical director Aga Serugo-Lugo and composers Electra Perivolaris and Francesca Le Lohé, the cast of all ages took Pagliacci to pieces, reimagined it in the light of their own lives and honed a fast-moving 15-minute drama that served as a curtain-raiser to ETO’s new production of this verismo classic.

Ideas for melodies and text suggested by the cast were fashioned into a musical narrative that stripped down the action to the dilemma of Nedda, the talented yet downtrodden wife of jealous, controlling Canio, the clown in a group of travelling players. With an egalitarian approach to performance (no hierarchy of principals and chorus here), several individuals took turns to don a simple coat to denote that they were now one of the two central characters.

Should Nedda leave Canio for her lover?, asked the cast, over often beguiling writing for strings and woodwind, tenderly played by the ETO orchestra. Nedda appealed directly to the audience: “What would you do in my place?” Back came the answer from the cast: get out – the very opposite of Leoncavallo’s bloody conclusion. Nedda was now “free at last to tell my own story”, and through their upliftingly sincere performances we got the sense that those on stage – most for the very first time – were free at last too.

The ETO Pagliacci that followed featured some strong characterisations, notably from soprano Paula Sides as Nedda and baritone Danny Shelvey as her lover Silvio. Tenor Ronald Samm makes a convincingly harrowed and paranoid Canio, his voice dulled by misery. Regrettably, director Eleanor Burke’s admirable effort to make this 1892 piece a 21st-century psychodrama misfires: the suggestion that Canio and Nedda are the equivalent of modern-day celebrities, always under scrutiny, never quite lands. It’s not always clear whether the chorus are playing members of the travelling troupe, members of their audience or demons inside Canio’s head, and just when the drama is beginning to build, the insertion of an interval kills all tension completely.

Things become more coherent in the second act, where designer Michael Pavelka’s annoyingly cluttered first-act rehearsal room gives way to an amusingly kitsch 1960s all-pink kitchen (stylishly lit by Zeynep Kepekli), where the “play within a play” resembles a creaky US sitcom that goes horribly wrong when Canio’s pain becomes shockingly public. Consistently strong playing from the ETO orchestra, under Gerry Cornelius, kept things on track in this otherwise muddled and uneven production.

You could hardly ask for a more striking contrast than its touring show partner, The Gondoliers. Meticulously directed and choreographed by Liam Steel, with flamboyant costumes from Laura Jane Stanfield, it’s a riot of colour and spectacle. Steel recognises that dance rhythms are the engine of the piece, and drills the impressively energetic young cast through a series of intricate chorus numbers that would not look out of place in the West End, nimbly conducted by Jack Ridley.

WS Gilbert’s pantomime-like story may date from 1889 but its absurdities still resonate today when it reflects on rampant inequality, the corruption of the honours system, dodgy royalty and the pros and cons of republicanism. The outrageously vain and corrupt Duke and Duchess of Plaza-Toro (baritone Phil Wilcox and mezzo Lauren Young, having almost too much fun) tell brother gondoliers Marco (tenor Robin Bailey) and Giuseppe (baritone Samuel Pantcheff) that one of them was married at six months to their daughter Casilda (soprano Kelli-Ann Masterson) and is heir to the throne of a small island state. The problem is they don’t know which brother.

And so it goes on. Along the way we enjoy performances from baritone Matthew Siveter as the Grand Inquisitor, and mezzo Beth Moxon as Tessa, betrothed to Giuseppe, while marvelling at the lavishness of Pavelka’s touring set. The show, with Pagliacci, moves to Norwich, Chester, Canterbury, Cambridge, Truro and Durham. Catch it if you can.

Just space here to welcome the announcement of the Royal Opera’s new season. Among several highlights are the completion of Barrie Kosky’s Ring cycle, a new La Gioconda and – hard to believe – the first production of a Rameau opera at Covent Garden (Les Boréades).

Plus, hats off to English National Opera for winning best new opera production at the Olivier awards last Sunday for their searing production of Jake Heggie and Terrence McNally’s Dead Man Walking. After so much travail at the Coliseum, some good news. It announces its own season this week.

Pagliacci/The Gondoliers is touring until 21 May

Photographs by Richard Hubert Smith