‘The Merry Widow’, from Vienna to New York
The cast of The Merry Widow. Credit Mihaela Bodlovic.
A charming young woman living in a small and impecunious central European principality inherits a vast fortune from her late husband, and her fellow countrymen are desperate to retain the money at home. That requires finding her the right husband, and The Merry Widow, Franz Lehár’s delightful operetta, is about the ensuing shenanigans.
The setting is the country’s embassy in Paris, whose ambassador Baron Zeta is anxious to arrange a suitable wedding for the wealthy heiress, Hanna Glawari. The highly eligible Count Danilo would be ideal, but although he and she once had a relationship, and the spark is still alive, he absolutely will not be seen to marry for money. After many witty incidents and his absolute refusal to say he loves her, the only way out is for him to learn that a clause in her later husband’s will says that if she marries she will no longer own her vast fortune. Finally he can propose and be accepted, only finding out later that, while she will lose her fortune upon marriage, said fortune will automatically transfer to her husband. It’s a delightful farce, and all the better for its music by Lehár, a writer of numerous other operettas.
Such was the original, created in 1905 by the librettists Viktor Léon and Leo Stein, but in this production at Opera Holland Park, the director, John Savournin, and his librettist, David Eaton, had other ideas. They evidently thought it would be better to set it in the world of the New York mafia, which of course meant wholesale changes to the text. Savournin has given brilliant stage performances in other works and is clearly very talented, but this movement into directing may have been a step too far. One major problem is that Merry Widow contains a lot of spoken dialogue, and the cast were evidently expected to deliver this in New York accents, which really didn’t work.
The musicianship suffered no such problems, and the Orchestra of Scottish Opera (with whom this was a co-production), under the baton of Stuart Stratford, produced a wonderful bounce. So too the singers, headed by Paula Sides as a glamorous Hanna Glawari and Alex Otterburn as a very smooth Danilo. Wonderful singing from the pair of them, ably supported by Henry Waddington as Zeta, Rhian Lois as his wife Valentina (Valencienne in the original), and William Morgan as her admirer Camille de Rosillon. The essence of the work was safe in their hands. Although Savournin may have overreached with his rewrite, his stage direction was very good, particularly of the excellent chorus.
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