★★☆☆☆
Chalk this up as an honourable failure. Opera Holland Park has a loyalty card at the all-you-can-eat buffet of rare Italian operas from the verismo years — roughly 1890-1920 — and in recent years has dug in with particular relish. And since Mascagni and Leoncavallo are so often joined at the hip in double bills of their only hits, Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci respectively, it’s even-handed of the company to follow last year’s Iris, Mascagni’s weird Japanese drama, with this 1900 tragicomedy by Leoncavallo.
It’s a strange, elusive piece. In Paris, the showgirl Zazà falls in love with one of her upper-class admirers for a dare, only to find out from her theatre chum (and still-besotted ex) Cascart that this dream man is married. Discovering the existence of his angelic daughter, she drops a plan to prise him away from his wife and returns to the theatre instead.
Leoncavallo threads this together with a mixture of levity and pathos, the score infused with the sounds of the music hall where Zazà rules the roost. He convincingly paints two worlds — the stage one, where artifice rules, and the real one, where Zazà’s heart is broken. The show’s director, Marie Lambert, uses the width of the Holland Park stage to do the same, although a big chunk of the audience won’t be able to see the dancing girls and the pratfalls brought to life by Alyson Cummins’s designs and Camille Assaf’s smart costumes.
For all Leoncavallo’s tenderness and restraint, however, the drama rarely grips. The music has a brittle edge and Peter Robinson, conducting the City of London Sinfonia, is heavy-handed with it. Overall it’s easier to imagine Zazà as a sentimental silent film — or even a Douglas Sirk melodrama — than as an opera, which is a tribute to Leoncavallo’s modernity, but not his melodies.
The casting, too, is uneven. Anne Sophie Duprels has done marvellous things at this address, but doesn’t do enough early on to flesh out Zazà’s allure as well as her skittishness, and begins to pluck the heartstrings only in her final parting from Joel Montero’s Milio. Montero struck me as miscast as a debonair, philandering gentleman, and suffered persistent intonation difficulties on first night. Cameos from a large cast aren’t as pointed as they should be, with a vocally muddy Louise Winter lacking comic zest as Zazà’s hopeless mother, Anaide. But Ellie Edmonds makes a mark as Zazà’s faithful sidekick, Natalia, and if the audience’s sympathies go anywhere, it’s to Richard Burkhard’s generously sung and tenderly vulnerable Cascart. In opera, people like him never get the girl.
Box office: 0300 9991000, to July 29