Cinderella review: Not quite happy ever after

Cinderella

O’Reilly Theatre, National Opera House

★★★☆☆

Alma Deutscher made her Irish debut as a violinist, pianist and composer for Music for Galway in 2017 at the age of 12. She’s now back for the Irish premiere of her first full-length opera, Cinderella, at Wexford Festival Opera. The opera, which her website dates as having been composed between 2013 and 2020, was heard in an arrangement for ensemble by Giuseppe Montesano. The entire cast, with the exception of actor Peter McCamley in the speaking role of the Royal Minister, is drawn from the membership of the current Wexford Factory, the festival’s professional development programme for young singers.

Deutscher is nostalgic for a time when she believes music was beautiful, and her favoured manner is the evocation of a 19th century that knew nothing of Wagner, late Beethoven, the young Debussy or Richard Strauss. She focuses instead on a kind of sweetened salon music, with the suggestion of dance never that far away. It’s like a kind of censored fairy tale view of history, where all the inconvenience of menace and dark forces has been airbrushed out.

She has provided her own libretto, which has Cinderella (the vivacious soprano Megan O’Neill) as a composer, her loutish stepsisters Griselda and Zibaldona as highly competitive singers (soprano Hannah O’Brien and mezzo-soprano Emily Hogarty, both happy to spray high notes around the place).

Cinderella and her Prince (the mostly depressed tenor Michael Bell) meet through music (hers) and poetry (his). So instead of chasing through the land to find a foot to fit a slipper, he has to find someone who can complete a melody that only she has sung for him.

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The ailing but demanding King (the grave bass Peter Lidbetter), the kind Fairy (the rich-toned mezzo-soprano Deirdre Arratoon), and the manipulative Stepmother (the brittle soprano Amy Hewitt) lubricate the action, with the hyperactive Royal Minister of Peter McCamley engineering the best laughs.

[ Wexford Festival Opera 2022: Opening weekend veers from the mundane to the magical ]

Director Davide Gasparro and his set designer, Eleanora Rossi, make resourceful use of a transforming bed, costume designer Frances White makes an effective forest out of the enthusiastic singers of the Wexford Festival Children’s Chorus and, with the Wexford Festival Ensemble in the pit, Andrew Synnott conducts with sensitive zest.

It’s the music, which can only drive the ideas so far without sameyness, which is the major limiting factor.

Also at the National Opera House on Monday, October 31st, and, with a different Wexford Factory cast, on Saturday, October 29th, and Friday, November 4th, as part of Wexford Festival Opera