There is a terrific idea at the heart of The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, which is to take a bunch of the world’s most famous opera songs – Verdi, Wagner, Mozart, Tchaikovsky – rewrite the lyrics in an amusingly everyday fashion, then use these anachronistic arias to underscore an ensemble comedy. In other words: to take something stuffy and repurpose it into something silly. It is a real shame, then, that the show takes this cheeky idea and nearly squanders it.
The show – which has only passing similarities to Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budapest Hotel, despite the title – has been one of the most hyped of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe, and for good reason. It has been written by Isobel McArthur, the Glaswegian theatremaker that wrote, directed and starred in the Olivier Award-winning comedy Pride And Prejudice* (*Sort Of), which ran in the West End in 2021, and recently did a similar thing by irreverently adapting Robert Louis Stevenson’s Kidnapped for the National Theatre of Scotland.
