Cal McCrystal loves to make people laugh. He’s the mastermind behind the physical comedy in One Man, Two Guvnors and the man who made Paddington a slapstick film star. He’s overseen clowns and erotic cabaret with Cirque du Soleil and helped Hollywood stars to finesse their comic moves in Spider-Man 2. And this summer he will be “bouncing off the big trampoline” of a travelling circus show right on to the manicured lawns of Glyndebourne, where he’s directing Lehár’s The Merry Widow.
Even though the hit operetta had racked up more than half a million performances across the globe by the Sixties, this is the first full staging of the 1905 work at the Sussex opera house. McCrystal is still pinching himself that he has been invited to take the directing reins. “It had never occurred to me because my stuff is so mischievous, and I had Glyndebourne down as being a place for serious work,” he tells me over the phone from his home in north London. “But I’m delighted — and they all seem very excited to have me there.”
It is, he believes, the perfect moment to stage this show. “Since the pandemic, everybody now seems to want a fun, collective experience when they go out,” says McCrystal, who joins a creative team including the conductor John Wilson, an aficionado of music from this era. “Comedy has thrived since the end of 2021. The Merry Widow is a genuinely warm-hearted, funny piece. The tunes are so damn good, the story is a little miracle, and it’s a really believable farce.”
Given that this isn’t McCrystal’s first foray into this world, regular operagoers may be girding their loins for broad satire and a healthy dose of smut. McCrystal’s productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe and HMS Pinafore featured “silly characters” (his words) dressed as Boris Johnson and Jacob Rees-Mogg, while he describes his recent Le comte Ory at Garsington Opera as “Carry On Rossini”.
How is he going to strike a balance between a champagne operetta — all frothy plot and delicious waltzes — with crowd-pleasing jokes, physical comedy and crude gags? “I don’t know whether I’ll put any crude gags into The Merry Widow. None have occurred to me so far,” he says. “I’m so caught up in the romance of it, and not just from the two main characters, Hanna and Danilo, but the characters that surround them too. It’s a very idealised world, which I’m attracted to as I love escapism.”
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In its “very clever, very witty, deliberately Wildean adaptation” by Stephen Plaice and Marcia Bellamy, this new English-language version won’t be overly bawdy or stuffed with modern references. “It’s actually very firmly in the belle époque,” McCrystal says. “I want to create a definitive version, but one that is just extra delightful, extra beautiful, extra funny.”
Yet the sets and costumes take their cue from the golden age of Hollywood. “I’ve always felt that The Merry Widow is the prototype Hollywood musical comedy, and that era suits the grandeur of the piece and the lavishness of the music,” he says. Expect dancers too. “I’ve just done a show in Paris at the Lido, one of the great cabaret venues, so I’m looking forward to celebrating that sybaritic, French wildness when the action takes place at Maxim’s [a nightclub] in Act III. We’re getting six girls in who have a very acrobatic, skilled sexiness about them, and they’ll really whip the room up into a frenzy.”
If there’s a timeless appeal in the operetta’s rom-com, second-chance-at-love storyline, the experience of audiences over a century ago is, of course, quite different to today. What tickles one person’s sense of humour falls entirely flat elsewhere, so how do you make The Merry Widow laugh-out-loud funny in the 21st century? “We’ve got such attractive lead singers. Germán Olvera [Danilo] is one of the most charismatic baritones I’ve ever seen, and obviously, Danielle de Niese [Hanna] is a goddess. The electricity and sexual chemistry between them is going to be hilarious,” McCrystal says. “I’ve also got the brilliant Tom Edden playing Njegus, the factotum at the embassy. He’s a funny-boned, musical actor who’s just been in Crazy for You. He’ll be the audience’s man in the show, the one with the most asides.”
McCrystal hopes that this Merry Widow will go far. “There’s enormous commercial potential with it. If everybody loved it, I would love it to go to the West End,” the director says, music to the ears, surely, of de Niese, who starred in Andrew Lloyd Webber’s Aspects of Love in London last year. “I always just want more and more people to see the stuff I do. If I make a show for a limited run, it’s like a death when you get to closing night.
• Danielle de Niese: Why I chose Andrew Lloyd Webber over Glyndebourne
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“The Glyndebourne audience is mostly made up of people who go to see everything there — and it’s a wonderful atmosphere because of that. But most of the population don’t get to see productions at Glyndebourne. They used to tour but the Arts Council has removed its touring funding. So this is a way of thinking, ‘If it looks like a hit show, let’s bring it a bigger audience.’”
The Glyndebourne Festival runs from May 16 to August 25. Times+ members have priority booking from February 23 to March 1. For details, go to mytimesplus.co.uk
