Offenbach
Belle Lurette – Operetta in three Acts to a libretto by Ernest Blum, Édouard Blau and Raoul Toché [sung to an English version by Paul Featherstone, in an orchestration by James Widden]
Malicorne – Paul Featherstone
Duc de Marly – Robin Bailey
Lurette – Monica McGhee
Marceline – Kristin Finnigan
Belhomme / La Boisene – Giles Davies
Campistrel – Michael Ferguson
Merluchet – Cameron Mitchell
Cigogne – Tristan Stocks
Friquette – Rebecca Hughes
New Sussex Opera Chorus
St Paul’s Sinfonia
Toby Purser
David Foster – Director
Victoria Gillians – Designer
Jason Ahn – Lighting Designer
Kitty Needham – Choreographer
Reviewed by: Curtis Rogers
Reviewed: 20 November, 2022
Venue: The Old Market, Hove, East Sussex, UK
Belle Lurette was Offenbach’s final operetta, written concurrently with The Tales of Hoffmann, and remained incomplete at his death in 1880 but was finished by Delibes, so that it could be given its premiere later that year. It received its first UK performance the following year, but has apparently not been seen here since, and so true to their mission to revive rare repertoire, New Sussex Opera has done a valuable service in bringing this work to light again now.
David Foster’s production sets the comedy around the same time as the composition, in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, though the Duc de Marly and his steward, Malicorne, aptly evoke the Ancien Régime in their attire, suggesting the sort of aristocratic raffishness at which the work takes aim. That setting also provides the appropriate backdrop for the mid-Lenten carnival (Mi-Carême) against which Act Three takes place, which became known in the nineteenth-century as the feast of laundresses: as one of that profession, Lurette leads her co-workers in a revenge attack on the Duc when she discovers his devious reasons for marrying her.
The radical political undertones of the work inspired an East German film in 1960 (Die schöne Lurette) and Foster seems to tap into the operetta’s revolutionary theme by having the cast assembled menacingly on stage, complete with the Tricolore, as the curtain comes down at the end of Act Two, apparently resembling Delacroix’s paining Liberty Leading the People. With a small stage at Hove’s The Old Market, they cope well throughout the performance in keeping the choreography alive, which is presumably less constrained at the other venues where this run of performances is being taken.
The singers certainly ensure an alert performance of the music in a score which is relatively lengthy for such an operetta and, in this English version at least, keeps the spoken dialogue relatively brief. For the most part the words – sung or spoken – carry well despite the lack of surtitles at Hove. As the eponymous beautiful laundress, Lurette, who seems to capture the hearts of every man around her (like a more innocent Carmen, that phenomenally successful opera having been premiered only five years before this operetta) Monica McGhee captures her good-natured character with her finely placed and sustained singing, avoiding any histrionics. Kristin Finnigan is more suitably arch as the matronly Marceline, the owner of the laundry in which Lurette works, the character’s frumpish demeanour a defensive front for her own amorous yearnings.
They find their (initially unlikely) resolution in Malicorne, after the disguises and jests of the Mi-Carême festivities, played with form by Paul Featherstone, who is a seasoned performer of the larger-than-life characters in such comic repertoire who are typically given the patter songs, as here. When Malicorne infiltrates the laundry in search of a bride for the Duc, as a supposed civil servant studying such institutions, Featherstone eloquently delivers his improbable song explaining his love of statistics. In his bid later to avoid Marceline from recognising him as the man who had formerly tried to seduce her, he adopts a deliberately wavering mid-European accent to explain his pretended origins from an (unspecified) area on the Danube, which prompts the orchestra to quote Johann Strauss II’s famous waltz.
Robin Bailey is a suavely efficient Duc de Marly, whose only motivation to become married at first is simply so that he can comply with the condition of his inheritance from his aunt, that he does so before reaching the age of 21, and then intends to pack off his wife to stay with that aunt in the country. In his song recounting his past love affairs – the freedom to pursue which he would rather retain – a turn of phrase in the repeated verse recalls, presumably consciously, Cherubino’s ‘Voi che sapete’. After marrying Lurette and then risking the onslaught of the laundresses, the Duc realises he is on to a good thing with her after all, seeing as it is revealed that she is the kind-hearted woman who had earlier, anonymously, forewarned him about a plot against him.
Michael Ferguson, Cameron Mitchell and Tristan Stocks all provide light-hearted humour as the lovesick singer, Campistrel, poet Merluchet, and painter Cignone respectively, as they also seek Lurette’s attentions and play off each other’s’ pretensions. Giles Davies plays up effectively the affectations of Belhomme, leading a cohort of soldiers who also come to flirt with the laundresses, to the consternation of Marceline.
In the reduced orchestration, St Paul’s Sinfonia play one to a part, which sometimes leaves them exposed, but they keep up a vigorous pace, especially in the bigger numbers when the whole ensemble comes together and exerts commendable enthusiasm and energy. Toby Purser is attentive to the changes of moods and genres in the succession of numbers and ensures equally disciplined and hearty choral singing from the NSO Chorus.With limited resources the company brings off a charmingly humorous – and sometimes bawdy – work which displays Offenbach’s ever-fertile gift for melody.