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.
While those shows were non-stop fun from the off, though, the problem here is that McArthur takes, far too long to get to the good bit – the bit where The Grand Old Opera House Hotel bursts into life with its entertainingly re-hashed classical music. The set-up takes forever – and is too contrived and complex. You could walk in two-thirds of the way through director Gareth Nicholls’ production, and not miss much.
The story is set in a huge, anonymous hotel, where the staff are exhausted and the ghosts of the building’s former life as a concert hall still haunt the crumbling corridors. Two employees, Aaron and Amy, never meet but nonetheless fall in love through a shared passion for opera. For an hour, they communicate through purely cassette tapes left for each other to find. Eventually, there is a pay-off – a hilarious, hectic, 20-minute punchline, in which they dash through the hotel looking for each other, belting out re-written opera hits – but, boy, is it hard work getting there.
There is some farcical fun with the rogue’s gallery of ghastly guests staying at The Grand Old Opera House Hotel, and the seven-strong cast deserve credit for the ridiculous number of costume changes they get through – as well as their resplendent singing. An angsty Ali Watt and a bright-as-a-button Karen Fishwick are good as Aaron and Amy, and share an adorable chemistry when they finally meet. The whole show is great when it gets going, in fact, but you just can’t leave the laughter that long.
