CityLife

Paradise Moscow

BACK at The Lowry after eight years, Opera North’s version of the 1950s musical by Shostakovich was as amusing as ever, and twice as snappy.

It was David Pountney’s production of a realisation devised by himself and Gerard McBurney – this time with Caroline Clegg as associate director, and again with James Holmes (who has contributed to the music arrangements, too) in charge in the pit. Set and and costume design by Robert Innes Hopkins deserve a gong.

The original choreography was by Strictly Come Dancing’s Craig Revel Horwood – and he was there in the audience to see it brilliantly realised once more, with high kicks and acrobatics from leading lady Summer Strallen and leading man Eaton James, cavorting kitchen utensils, dancing flowerpots and all.

The story is a simple one: the long-suffering comrade citizens are being re-housed in the paradise of an overspill tower block estate, but they’re up against the officialdom of the Soviet system who are out to make what they can. It’s a situation you’d think we know about here, too.

West End quality

Richard Suart was inimitably himself as Barabashkin, the obsequious estate manager, teaming well with Richard Angas as apparatchik Drebyednyetsov even when they couldn’t quite get the dance moves identical.

The entire cast is West End quality – the kind of team who can act, sing and move that Opera North assembles so well – the large chorus augmented with eight dancers, and the whole thing built, especially after the interval, with one show-stopping routine after another, to a feelgood finale and neatly choreographed curtain calls.

But – and this is a sad thing to report – its one and only performance in the north west played to a half-empty theatre. If you want to see it now, you’ll have to go to Newcastle or Nottingham (or catch it at the Bregenz Festival, if your summer itinerary takes that in).

That Opera North can put on such a superb and lively show, but can’t draw a decent audience to see it in Salford (a joke about Hazel Blears hardly raised a titter, suggesting to me that few Salfordians were there) raises a lot of questions about its role at The Lowry, its marketing, and its perception as an opera specialist rather than an entertainment outfit.

If the £12m of public money it gets each year (78 per cent of total revenue) were paid as personal expenses rather than through the Arts Council, there would be a national outcry.

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