Tasty tunes

The big joke about George Bernard Shaw is that a fellow who despised “light opera” and music theatre should now be remembered only as the guy behind My Fair Lady. Occasionally you see that someone has trotted out one of the old boy’s plays, to polite applause, and no doubt he’s still buried in some syllabus of the kind that saw us dutifully grouse through Man and Superman for O Level. The truth is that with a few well-known exceptions (many on artificial life support) the drama of the past is a mystery to us, alien, baffling. And music theatre, operetta, opera, is the only possible afterlife, the mysterious power of music dragging the things out of their grave.

Like this one, a 1908 adaptation by the Austrian composer Oscar Straus of Arms and the Man (1894), and itself forgotten for decades after a roaring thirty-year success. As rewritten by Jeff Clarke, panjandrum of Opera della Luna, it is pretty faithful to the play: Shaw sniffily refused to let Straus use his title, words, names, so Straus’s original is basically nonsense, but GBS is now out of copyright, and we can assess his value as a script-writer for the music theatre, a kind of W.S. Gilbert 2.0, perhaps.

And in fact he’s really not bad. Operetta scripts from Offenbach to G&S to Johann Strauss to Franz Lehar (the only surviving shows, really, but the forgotten ones are much the same) tend to share a ambience of absurdity with a neat (often infinitesimal) socio-political subtext, and Shaw’s play has both, with its ridiculous soldiers and anti-war vibe (perhaps a tad earnest) plus a spot of inter-sex emotional education that owes something to Pride and Prejudice. It’s a bit less silly than most operettas, which on balance is a good thing, and there were definitely times during the evening when it felt a better piece than Arms and the Man ― and distinctly more fun.

As you will have forgotten, Shaw’s play is set amid some old Bulgar/Serb barney, wherein fugitive Swiss mercenary Bluntschli shins up a drainpipe to escape his Bulgar pursuers and finds himself in the bedroom of Raina, girlfriend of Bulgar war-hero pinup Sergius. She hides Bluntschli; she, her mother and maid (all lonely for men, off at the war) fall for his curls and bouncy boyishness, and lots of farcical stuff happens when Sergius and Raina’s daddy return from battle, entailing a general realignment of affections. Shaw dishes up some amusing characters ― the sensibly combat-avoiding Swiss who carries chocolate in his ammo pouch (hence the show’s name), his preening, thicko Bulgar oppo Sergius, the bluff old paterfamilias Kasimir, all undermined by three sparky, opportunist women who leverage the usual 19th-century constraints to their advantage.

Straus and his librettists and Clarke manhandle this into musical form, with the usual operetta mix of (quite a lot of) straight chat, musical narrative and the expected songs and ensembles, well chosen to highlight the dramatic and comic possibilities, and set by Straus to the standard Viennese mix of waltzes, polkas and the rest; plus sentimental songs of which the most familiar is Raina’s “My Hero”, addressed to a photo of Sergius, given a fabulously full-hearted run-out by Eleanor Sanderson Nash early in the show ― the rest of which being devoted to her transferring of affections to Bluntschli.

I guess operetta is a formulaic sort of thing, but there’s a lot of invention in the extended ensembles, musical and verbal, and Straus can whip up a catchy number with the best of them, cleverly orchestrated and full of those fast-shifting emotions and affects — ebullient to wistful, mostly ― that operetta loves. His musical models certainly include Sullivan along with the continentals, and there’s a very cute nostalgic, folky, mock-modal women’s trio amid the rumty-tum. This is all powered along by conductor James Ham and his 11 players, a score full of Balkan violin larks and nice woodwind curlicues.

It’s really brilliantly performed — a seamless blend of straight and musical acting and singing streets ahead of anything “West End” not just because the singing is obviously so much better, but also since this cast can do a lot more than simply shout their lines: I particularly liked Kristin Finnigan’s jaundiced, spiky Catherine (Raina’s mother) and Paul Featherstone (Kasimir, her husband) as a kind of CJ-on-acid old Blimp. Guy Elliott has an effortlessly delightful tenor, deployed perfectly for the charm of Bluntschli, Robin Bailey a more steely version just right for the vain fool Sergius, and Felicity Buckland does a great job as the cynical maid Louka, a kind of Greek Chorus figure who also gets a good hand in the action.

And there are a few trump cards: being performed at the jewel of Wilton’s, is obviously one; another being Shaw’s Point, as you might put it, about sensible relations between the sexes, which brings a touching bit of human development — plus Clarke’s own added extra, an air-raid riff on the fact that the Shaftesbury Theatre, where the show was running in 1941, took a direct hit in the Blitz. It’s unusual enough for an operetta to be “about” anything; and nice that this one is about quite a lot — in the least finger-wagging way.

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At Wilton’s Music Hall until June 27 and If Opera, Bradford-on-Avon, Wiltshire, August 11-14