So there’s this dead parrot… A strange
start indeed for a French 19th-century rom-com. But this is no
common stage work: it is Vert-Vert by Jacques Offenbach, France’s finest composer of operetta, creator of such
classic favourites as Orpheus in the
Underworld and La belle Hélène. For Garsington Opera at Wormsley, the director Martin Duncan has joined
forces with the conductor and Offenbachophile David Parry to offer a new staging of
this little-performed madcap comedy, brilliant in its musical hues and light
as a feather.
Hot on the heels of Garsington’s 2012 production
of the same composer’s La Périchole, this
is the latest in a succession of Offenbach gems that Parry has been pro-active
in polishing up for today’s audiences. He masterminded an Offenbach celebration
CD, Entre Nous, for Opera Rara in 2007,
continued with a complete recording of Vert-Vert
three years later, and has never looked back. (The clip above is from the recording and features Toby Spence and Jennifer Larmore, who aren't at Garsington, just so you know.)
Try not to hold a hot drink while you read
the synopsis. Having lost their beloved bird, Vert-Vert, the young ladies of a
convent school decide they must find a new mascot and settle upon an innocent
lad named Valentin, changing his name to the parrot’s for the purpose. Whisked
away to visit his aunt, though, Valentin soon finds himself in an inn,
surrounded by soldiers and singers… Before long he has learned to swear, drink
and fall in love - and has even been elevated to the status of star tenor.
“The parrot is only an excuse,” Duncan
assures us. “Yes, it opens in a girls’ convent school and they bury a dead
parrot in the first five minutes. But after that it becomes very human and
touching: it’s the story of a young man’s journey to adulthood.”
Comedy can be a tall order to stage,
especially in opera. Duncan, himself a distinguished actor, has been coaching
Garsington’s young cast in the tricks of the trade. “I know it’s a cliché, but
comedy is a very serious business,” he says. “You have to treat it seriously
and then the humour comes out, but if you start trying to be funny, it’s really
not funny for the audience. Singers have a double whammy because they’re not
used to dialogue and comic dialogue is even harder. With a piece like this one,
which is a bit crazy, it’s essential that everyone in the cast has a real
belief in their predicaments.”
Vert-Vert is being performed in English, with a translation by Parry himself.
He is full of praise for the score: the leading roles, he says, are as
demanding as those of Offenbach’s most famous opera, The Tales of Hoffmann, while “the music is definitely superior to Orpheus in the Underworld” (the one that
features the world’s most famous can-can).
Starring Robert Murray as Valentin and
Fflur Wyn as his sweetheart, Mimi, Garsington’s new production gives us the
chance to judge for ourselves.
