Cherry Town, Moscow review – Shostakovich’s operetta becomes a zany romp but outstays its welcome

Tright here’s one thing disconcerting about watching Shostakovich’s operetta from the post-Stalin Nineteen Fifties within the current context of Vladimir Putin’s struggle in opposition to Ukraine. With its title tailored from Cheryomushki, which means Cherry Timber, named after certainly one of Nikita Khrushchev’s housing initiatives for reconstructing Moscow, there are parts of subversive satire and irony as pissed off residents are pitted in opposition to the corrupt bosses in cost, however it’s typically light-weight and anodyne.

There’s actually not one of the pungency or drama of Shostakovich’s two actual operas, The Nostril and Girl Macbeth of Mtsensk District. Regardless of the neat paradox of demolition man Boris (Dafydd Allen) who blows up the previous properties to make approach for the brand new, and Lidochka (Rusnė Tušlaitė) along with her shades of nihilism, too many characters are unprepossessing – even in David Pountney’s racy translation, dialogue is stilted with minimal plot – and, at an hour and 50 minutes with no interval, it feels doubly long-drawn-out. Not apparent repertoire then for the kids of the Welsh Nationwide Youth Opera.

However there’s no denying the verve with which they deal with issues on this manufacturing. Updating it to the much less drab Nineteen Eighties, director Daisy Evans and designer Loren Elstein go for zany romp, maximising the theatricality, cheerfully taking the Mikhail out of all of it, with a Duchamp dadaist contact because the urinal exhibited within the Historical past of the Reconstruction Museum comes off the wall to be brandished in certainly one of many music and dance routines. Motion director Anjali Mehra brings slickness and wit to those.

Shostakovich’s pastiche is jolly and jazzy, with some Russian melancholy, too. Utilizing Gerard McBurney’s chamber orchestra model, conductor Alice Farnham makes it zip alongside and, within the pit, the 18 WNO gamers sound as in the event that they’re having a blast, although certainly balking on the umpteenth reappearance of the Cheryomushki refrain, catchy sufficient the primary time, however ultimately finished to demise. Lots of the principal singers, miked up, present appreciable future vocal potential. All throw themselves into the pantomime and slapstick with enthusiasm, which is the way it was greeted, if not precisely so by me.