Romeo and Juliet in New York, Marty returns to Prague

ETO showcases fine singers in Bellini; Scottish Opera champions Janáček

Star-cross’d lovers in extremis: Jessica Cale (Giulietta) Samantha Price (Romeo) Picture © Richard Hubert Smith

With Bellini’s I Capuleti e i Montecchi - sung in the original Italian but billed as The Capulets and Montagues - Robin Norton-Hale has scored her first direct hit since succeeding James Conway as general director of English Touring Opera (ETO) three years ago. Indeed ETO hits bullseye in an unfailingly theatrical staging by Eloise Lally, who directed a decent, if more conventional, account of Donizetti’s Lucrezia Borgia in Norton-Hale’s first season. Italian bel canto certainly suits this peripatetic company’s modest resources, although Bellini’s Romeo and Juliet opera is by no means easy to cast with the young British-based singers ETO tends to favour.

Exquisite Bellinian cantilena: Cale as Giulietta Picture © Richard Hubert Smith

Lally’s updating of the action to a mid 20th century “Gangs of New York” scenario is hardly novel: when the curtain at Hackney’s Empire Theatre rises on an Edward Hopper-style bar (set and costumes by Lily Arnold), you can’t miss the echoes of Jonathan Miller’s long-running Rigoletto for English National Opera. While the ambience of Capuleti may be less well suited to a working class milieu than Verdi’s opera, it will undoubtedly win ETO more brownie points with the box-ticking Arts Council England. Happily, Lally directs her performers within this simple, yet meticulously in-period framework with such vitality that quibbles evaporate.