Two Weddings, One Bride

With the Sydney Opera House starting long renovations on its opera theatre, Opera Australia now moves to the smaller playhouse with a modest experiment to match.

Two Weddings, One Bride is a hit collage of European operetta from more than a century ago, a juke-box of ancient show tunes but with new lyrics and the bedding of a new story by operetta expert, Robert Andrew Greene. 

With no orchestra, it’s all up to Greene on grand as music director with just violinist Yuhki Mayne. 

Luckily, the songs are a delight – snatched from the best of Strauss, Offenbach, Lehar, Kalman and Stolz – and the six singers first-rate.  It’s a privilege to hear up close, in a smaller theatre, near a-cappella singing of such attack and musical agility.

Rewriting an operetta by Charles Lecocq, Greene retains the ridiculous scenario around this wedding day of twin identical brides thrown into confusion by one being abducted by pirates.

The setting however, colourfully rendered by Owen Phillips, is shifted to exotic Morocco, circa World War Two.  Tim Chappel’s period costumes and John Rayment’s lights add even more colour.

Revealingly, this setting is just half way between now and when these jewels of light entertainment were so popular. Operettas once had a reputation for sharp social satire but there’s little wit and modern mocking in this “update” from Greene.

The singers mug like bad actors but director Dean Bryant keeps all the madcap silly business airborne enough for us not to care.

Geraldine Turner helps, bringing her comic gravitas to the Governor’s wife and, as her identical daughters, Julie Lea Goodwin brings a charismatic voicing well-learnt from musicals.  Andrew Jones and especially Nicholas Jones are entertaining, even convincing, while buffoonery thrives elsewhere.    

Whether mounting epic opera on Sydney Harbour or reworking it for smaller spaces, this one is an entertaining plunge by Opera Australia but in need of more comic and contemporary ambition.

Review by Martin Portus

Photographer: Prudence Upton