FIRST NIGHT

Opera review: L’oracolo/Mala vita; Dinner at Eight National Opera House, Wexford, Ireland

This year’s Wexford opera festival offered a frenetic Italian double bill and the European premiere of Dinner at Eight
Sergio Escobar and Francesca Tiburzi in Giordano’s Mala vita
Sergio Escobar and Francesca Tiburzi in Giordano’s Mala vita
CLIVE BARDA/ARENAPAL

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★★★★☆
It was national Slow Down day in Ireland when the 2018 season kicked off at Wexford Festival Opera, but clearly no one told the team picking this year’s selection of rare operas. We began with a frenetic Italian double bill featuring suicidal prostitutes, psychopathic opium addicts, child kidnap and a truly visceral murder that left the audience somewhere between shocked gasps and self-protective giggles.

Franco Leoni’s 1905 L’oracolo is the wilder half in all respects. It’s set in San Francisco’s Chinatown but would not win awards for community relations there. The eponymous “Oracle” is the wise doctor Uin-Sci, whose son Uin-San-Lui is in love with oppressed Ah-Joe. That puts him on a collision course with the opium den-running thug Cim-Fen, who is prepared to