★★☆☆☆
If only they had stopped after the overture! We would be hailing James Brining, the director of Opera North’s new staging, as a genius: the man who made sense of The Magic Flute.
The dumb show he concocts for that sizzling overture is indeed clever. A little girl puts an LP of Mozart’s music on the turntable (we must be back in the 20th century) as her nanny ushers her to bed. Upstage, however, her dad is holding a dinner party into which her estranged mother crashes and serves him (presumably) divorce papers. An emotional tug-of-war over the child ensues. The girl finally falls asleep, only to dream about The Magic Flute, with her dad morphing into Sarastro, her mum into the