The Merry Widow was born in Vienna but she made her fortune in the West End and on Broadway. The original 1905 Viennese production was a shoestring affair. It was the English-language revivals in London and New York that made the Widow a global smash, and that happened only after extensive rewriting, done with Lehar’s wholehearted endorsement. Hanna Glawari (deemed unpronounceable) was renamed Sonia Sadoya, Zeta became Baron Popoff and the comedian George Graves inserted a humorous monologue about a chicken called Hetty. You probably had to be there.
Anyway, the point is that operetta is protean. Rewrites, updates and changes of setting are not only forgivable; they’re intrinsic to the genre. So there’s a world of artistic difference between a director arbitrarily relocating (let’s say) Der fliegende Holländer to the 21st-century Home Office, and what the director John Savournin has done with Scottish Opera’s new staging of The Merry Widow. Together with his regular collaborator David Eaton, Savournin has retranslated the book and lyrics. They’ve shifted the whole thing to 1950s Manhattan and – noticing that ‘Pontevedro’ and ‘Cosa Nostra’ share the same rhythm – have transformed Lehar’s Balkan diplomats into mafiosi. Zeta is the godfather, and Danilo (Alex Otterburn) is his consigliere. Bada bing!
Well, whaddya gonna do? British audiences simply aren’t as au fait with Ruritania as they used to be. You can play The Merry Widow as a period piece, as Glyndebourne did last year, sending it up in the process (Ambassador, you are spoiling it!). Or you can do what Lehar would have done – trust the characters, story and score and do whatever it takes to put them across.
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