A Merry Widow, not a scary widow
Although it is hard to imagine a radical production of The Merry Widow, the heart does rather sink at the ENO’s artistic director John Berry’s reassurance in the programme that “this will be a production of The Merry Widow you will recognise.”
Still, Saturday night’s opening was full of pleasures and I found my eyes filling with tears of joy on at least three occasions, one of them when the orchestra and chorus crept up sensuously on the widow’s song about the unrequited love of a huntsman for a wood spirit, or Vilja.
This is one of the most glorious melodies ever written and partly explains why Franz Lehar’s operetta went global a century ago, long before Andrew Lloyd Webber and Cameron Mackintosh started flooding the international market.
My piano teacher always sang Vilja at our annual pupils’ concert, as well as Softly Awakes My Heart from Saint-Saens’ Samson and Delilah, and I used to accompany her, not even knowing what the words were about but unaccountably moved by the music.
Mrs Ruth O’Keeffe was a German mezzo soprano with a heaving bosom and a handsome carriage. She had married Mr O’Keeffe, an employee of British Railways, after the last War and they lived two doors away from us in Chadwell Heath, Essex.
At five bob a lesson, it struck my parents as a good wheeze to get us out of the house for half an hour each week. They bought a second hand piano for £5 and my reward for practising one hour a day and achieving a certain level of competence was discovering musical theatre.
Years later, my father told me that Mr O’Keeffe, fearsomely tall and imposing, who strode off to work each morning in a pin-striped suit and a trilby hat, used to change into overalls in the office at Liverpool Street and get down on the line as a manual worker. His brief-case contained his sandwiches, and he’d change back into smart civvies for the journey home and swagger into suburbia.
This would constitute a good outline for a musical comedy: layers of social guile and deception swathed in the hints of musical nirvana emanating from Mrs O’Keeffe’s little front parlour where local urchins battled with scales, arpeggios, Hummel and Clementi and the easier early sonatas of Mozart and Beethoven…Mr O’Keeffe hated music and resented its inculcation by his wife in the lives of others.
Some of these thoughts raced across my mind during the flatter moments of the ENO production. Amanda Roocroft is slightly common as the widow, and she’s not really all that sexy — not as sexy as Mrs O’Keeffe, anyway — but there are lovely performances from John Graham-Hall as the embassy secretary she falls for, and also from Alfie Boe and Fiona Murphy as the adulterous lovers.
Roy Hudd bumbles about coarsely as the embassy clerk, completely unconstrained in his face-pulls, goofy double takes and dirty old man oeillades. It was lovely to see him, but not for long.
Simon Butteriss, whom I first saw in Cider with Rosie at the Greenwich Theatre three decades ago, and who remains a fresh-faced, youthful light tenor and fine exponent of Gilbert and Sullivan (he figures in Mike Leigh’s gorgeous, Oscar-winning Topsy-Turvy) pops up as an attache. ENO audiences will see him stretched further when he takes over the cuckolded baron from Richard Suart for two performances next month.
It is all moderately enjoyable — the excellent choreography is by Anthony van Laast and Nicola Treherne — but could have been so much better. Of course, it could have been so much worse, had not Jude Kelly pulled out of directing the show; her replacement, the veteran John Copley, now 75 years-old and shaky on his pins, is not exactly one of musical theatre’s rising stars but he’s always been Mr Fairly Reliable.
Despite Deirdre Clancy’s fine costumes (much better than the ghastly sacking she herself wore at the curtain call) and Howard Harrison’s glowing lighting, it’s all a bit tacky and second-rate around the edges. Jeremy Sams’s translation, though, first made for the Royal Opera House, is a total joy. And the band under Oliver von Dohnanyi played beautifully and affectionately.
