Hang on a sec, what’s this peculiar feeling coming over me… ? Damn, the sensibility is so etiolated after marinating in those endless operas, the reactions dull, the receptors atrophied… But surely – yes! – it is true! I am most definitely … being entertained. 

The scene of this epiphany, appropriately, is Ephesus. You can tell, because the tourist information mosaic directs you to Hermes Messenger Services (no Roman charges, geddit?), Medusa coiffures, three-headed dog night at the taverna and KFC for the way home afterwards – that’s Korinth Fried Calamari, obvs. And the divertissement in question is Richard Rodgers and Lawrence Hart’s snappy 1938 version of Shakespeare’s actually funny Comedy of Errors, unseen in London I think since 1991. It was the first Shakespeare-based musical, and had operatic antecedents, notably a jovial Lorenzo da Ponte-scripted romp by the Englishman Stephen Storace, Mozart’s friend, performed by Bampton Classical Opera a few years ago.

The old American musical comedy was really a miracle

COE is the one, you remember, about two sets of identical twins, separated years back, suddenly being in Ephesus together but somehow managing to avoid each another for the best part of the show’s two hours. Shakespeare goes through – and juggles brilliantly – every permutation of the mistaken-identity lark, and book-writer George Abbott spices the thing up further; the Antipholuses and Dromios are unalike in everything but appearance, so the comedy of sensibility runs deep, and Abbott sasses up the sexual larks. Did Dromio S (as we scholars say) really shag Dromio E’s wife there? Certainly looked like it. But as Larry Hart’s lyrics tell us, “should a man philander, the goose forgives the gander” – though that’s in sexy Syracuse, not arsey Ephesus. Oh well. 

Against the most rudimentary of sets, Mark Giesser’s staging flits through the jubilant jigsaw of idiocies that makes up the plot with great verve, the fruitful confusions only enhanced by the role doubling and tripling of the eight cast members, who slip faultlessly between accents, allegiances and marriages. It’s always a relief for the opera critic on furlough to be reminded that people can, sometimes, sing, dance and speak without falling over or destroying the scenery, and this is a cast of (for the most part) very young music-theatre athletes – several with opera training and experience, which brings proper class (without affectations) to the singing, and mostly avoids the weird distortions of music-theatre pronunciation. It’s a very London Ephesus, by the way, with a great mix of poshoes, fops, wideboys (and girls) and cockneys, while the Syracusan visitors have clearly landed from the Bronx.

And there is much musical variety – ballads, belters, Andrews sisters-style close harmony, bitchy duets, big song-and-dance ensembles including the ecstatic ‘Oh, Diogenes!’ Of the attested bangers you’ll know the jaunty and nicely saucy ‘Sing for your supper’, and recognise several others. They are powered along by music director Benjamin Levy on keyboard, heading an equally multitasking band of five, with special kudos to Katie Wood on a rare tripling of flute, clarinet and sax, and Ben Quilter’s pinpoint drums and percussion. 

The old American musical comedy was really a miracle: it’s hard to believe that a product as smart and finished as The Boys from Syracuse came only a decade after the genre’s birth in Jerome Kern’s Show Boat. Sure, there was a rich inheritance, the mating of the verbal and dramatic wit of G&S with all the musical variety of the European operetta from Jacques Offenbach to Franz Lehar, plus the all-American Ziegfeld Follies – and a hungry gang of largely Jewish composers who had no complexes about writing “cheap” music, elevating it very quickly to answer the multiple demands of this sophisticated new genre. The Boys is definitely a play with songs – the through-composed musical would be born a few years later in Rodgers’s collaboration with Oscar Hammerstein on Oklahoma! But Hart’s lyrics are harder, bitterer, funnier than Hammerstein’s, and though the shows are less polished they are also a good deal less sickly.

Excuse the digression. But do bestir yourself to see this miracle recreated, small in scale but in award-level, joyous and ambitious form, above a Highgate pub until September 29th.