Scottish Opera: Merry Widow/Double Bill

Glawari’s ‘Sicilian’ festa: Paula Sides (centre) sings The Merry Widow Picture © Mihaela Bodlovic

Scottish Opera has a long and proud operetta tradition. My first experience of the company was in 1974, when this company brought five titles to the New Theatre in Oxford, including a new Anthony Besch Merry Widow starring Catherine Wilson - one of the most glamorous sopranos ever to tread the boards.

More recently, the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire has been the company’s chosen nod to the lighter muse, with a slap-up Venetian ‘Just-One-Cornetto’ staging of The Gondoliers and a marginally less lavish version of the rarely performed Utopia Ltd - both in 2022.

This season the Glasgow-based company is doing something similar: a sumptuously designed new Merry Widow and a double-bill pairing G&S’s Trial by Jury with Toby Hession’s A Matter of Misconduct!, a contemporary operetta (when did a British company last commission one of those?). Both shows are collaborations with Opera Holland Park and D’Oyly Carte Opera, to be presented in London at the Holland Park Theatre in June - with financial input from D’Oyly Carte, now a regular partner of Scottish Opera, whose librarian in Glasgow curates the substantial D’Oyly Carte archive.