The Merry Widow review – De Niese and Olvera are

Glyndebourne, Sussex
Double entendres, extra dialogue and sight gags ensure that Cal McCrystal’s new staging entertains, but it’s at the expense of emotional power. In the pit, John Wilson is superlative, likewise Germán Olvera’s charismatic Danilo

The Glyndebourne season continues with a new production of The Merry Widow, wonderfully conducted by John Wilson, less successfully directed by Cal McCrystal, and with Danielle de Niese as Hanna Glawari and the superb Mexican baritone Germán Olvera as Danilo. It’s an oddly unwieldy evening, affecting, funny and irritating in equal measure, by no means serving Franz Lehár’s masterpiece as well as it should, but paradoxically also reminding us on occasion why it really is one of the great works of the 20th century.

McCrystal, often an excellent director, misjudges tone and pace here too frequently. A new English version by Stephen Plaice and Marcia Bellamy pads the work out with reams of extra dialogue that add some 40 minutes to the originally projected running time. There are double entendres a plenty, where something more discreet might actually have been sexier, and interruptions and interventions abound, with Tom Edden’s Njegus cracking jokes with the audience before the show starts, and inviting us to play “Restaurant versus Picnic” after the dinner interval, though he is so delightfully camp and entertaining that he gets away with much of it.