Johann Strauss’s Die Fledermaus must have done more for champagne sales than any other operetta. A good production, however, demands plenty of onstage fizz too, but the bubbles start to rise rather late in the day in Opera Holland Park’s new staging.
Director and choreographer Liam Steel uses the Metropolitan Opera’s 2013 revamped English version with lyrics by Jeremy Sams and a new book by Douglas Carter Beane. His chosen setting, however, is London on New Year’s Eve 1929; cue references to the Sitwells and the Mitfords. In its determination to reflect the anything goes spirit of the age there’s even a cheeky reference to Winston Churchill’s supposed dalliance with Ivor Novello (how did he find it? “Musical,” goes the apocryphal tale.) The idea has legs, turning a 19th-century Viennese operetta into a louche Noël Coward farce with lines that are at times deliciously tart.
