Opera North’s second offering for the autumn season is a Bernstein double bill – a revival of his one-act opera Trouble in Tahiti, and a new dance work to West Side Story Symphonic Dances.

Despite Charles Edwards set and Hannah Clark’s costumes setting the opera squarely in 1950s America, the opera is surprisingly modern in its messages – or maybe less has changed than we think. Sam and Dinah are married, with a nine-year-old Junior. Sam works in an office, Dinah is a ‘housewife’. It is the day of Junior’s school play, and he is the lead. Over breakfast, Dinah reminds Sam of his commitment to attend, only Sam remembers he has the handball final at the same time, and he wants to win the gold cup. Well, even if Sam and Dinah weren’t going through a bad patch in their marriage, this certainly gets their day off to a bad start.

There is a soundtrack to the opera – the radio is on and the Trio sing happy jingles for radio commercials, which amount rather to a Greek chorus pointing up the inconsistencies between the American dream and its actuality. Director Matthew Eberhardt has the Trio – Laura Kelly-McInroy, Joseph Shovelton and Nicholas Butterfield – as cheesy as can be.

In the afternoon, Sam has his game – he appears with the cup and sings ‘There is a law about men’ which is all about how some men (like Sam) are winners, and some are not. On the night, Quirijn de Lang forgot some of his words but kept going and covered it well.
Meanwhile, Dinah has been to the movies, the eponymous Trouble In Tahiti, a terrible movie, and Sandra Piques Eddy launches into a full-on, excoriating critique of Hollywood’s Dream Factory, its romantic cliché-driven narratives. We have all seen that film, or one like it, and its children and grandchildren, and why the song is not better known and regularly performed is beyond belief.

So neither goes to Junior’s play. Over dinner that night, again the couple fail to communicate but, in an attempt to fill the hours before sleep, Sam suggests they go to the movies, and Dinah agrees. They walk off together, oblivious of Junior, and Isaac Sarsfield’s desolate little form stares after them.

An alternative pairing might have been Bernstein’s Arias and Barcarolles, also for two singers, also scenes from a marriage. Instead, after a ten-minute bridging piece of spoken word, percussion and dance, the Symphonic Dances narrate not the West Side Story, but the melting pot societies of District 6, Sophiatown and South End in South Africa during the same era. Some readers may have seen the musical District 6, which toured in 1986, including to the Edinburgh International Festival.

With Antony Hermus conducting, the orchestra plays all three pieces with verve. The percussion, in particular, has plenty to do – the bridging piece Halfway and Beyond requiring hand-clapping from loud to one finger tapping the opposing palm – and Bernstein’s music comes across in all its variety of rhythm and genre.