L'Amant Jaloux review: Pinchgut Opera plays lovers' tiffs for laughs

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This was published 8 years ago

L'Amant Jaloux review: Pinchgut Opera plays lovers' tiffs for laughs

By Harriet Cunningham
Updated

L'AMANT JALOUX

Pinchgut Opera, City Recital Hall, December 3. Until December 8

Pinchgut Opera's Alexandra Oomens (Isabelle), Jessica Aszodi (Jacinte) and Celeste Lazarenko (Leonore), in L'Amant Jaloux.

Pinchgut Opera's Alexandra Oomens (Isabelle), Jessica Aszodi (Jacinte) and Celeste Lazarenko (Leonore), in L'Amant Jaloux.Credit: Prudence Upton

★★★★

After a torrid tale of love and war mid-year, Pinchgut's second production for 2015 plays it for laughs.

L'Amant Jaloux (The Jealous Lover) is a fast-moving comedy based on the premise that men are blundering idiots from Mars and women are frivolous fools from Venus, but with warm hearts and sweet harmonies, not to mention a well-timed inheritance, the planets can get along just fine.

Pinchgut's co-artistic director, Erin Helyard, director Chas Rader-Shieber and translator Andrew Johnston have dusted off this little treasure and polished it to a high shine.

It's hard not to think composer Andre Gretry and his librettist, Thomas Hales, were borrowing ideas from Mozart's The Marriage of Figaro, until you realise that L'Amant Jaloux predates Mozart's masterpiece by a whole decade.

And with some minimal tweaking of the language, clever interpolations of additional material and fastidious direction, Gretry's forgotten triumph from 1778 has become a thoroughly 21st century entertainment.

The six-hander cast all act their socks off, trilingual in speech, song and gesture. In the intimate space of City Recital Hall you can see every roll of the eyes, every sidelong glance. It's fun. Enormous fun, in fact, to the point that it almost upstages the music.

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Jessica Aszodi is a wry Jacinte, Andrew Goodwin is an exuberantly French Florival, Alexandra Oomens parries his passionate advances with sweet-voiced style, and Ed Lyon is a torrid and passionate Don Alonze​.

Rader-Shieber choreographs the lovers' tiffs and cultural misunderstandings with such fluency that one almost forgets they are singing.

The two arias (for impressive baritone David Greco and the thrilling coloratura of Celeste Lazarenko), and the two instrumental entr'actes (from Stephen Lalor on mandolin and Melissa Farrow on baroque flute) are welcome punctuations, not just as showcases for the music, but also as a chance to catch one's breath and revel in the gorgeous sonorities of Pinchgut's band, the Orchestra of the Antipodes.

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