Opera House, Wetherspoon, Tunbridge Wells, Sunday 19 February 2017

The annual Sunday on which Tunbridge Wells’s glorious Opera House reverts to its musical roots and sets aside its current pub incarnation is always a  festive event. All credit to Wetherspoon for facilitating it. This year Merry Opera Company’s new show is revue rather than opera. And an engaging melange of musical theatre, songs from various genres and – of course –  opera it turns out to be.

An accomplished and versatile quartet – Andrea Tweedale, Gemma Morsley, Lawrence Olsworth-Peter and Matthew Quirk – shift between genres so adeptly that it feels as if we’re moved from classical (Mozart’s Un’aura amorosa nicely sung by tenor Olsworth-Peter, to Horrible Histories at a stroke. A rousing rendering of The Roast Beef of Old England complete with mezzo-soprano Morsley, sporting a colander-crown  on her head as Elizabeth I, ends the first half. In between the extremes are numbers such as a pleasing account of Purcell’s If Music Be the Food of Love from soprano Tweedale, and bass-baritone Matthew Quirk, having fun with Ted Waite’s I’ve Never Seen a Straight Banana.

Several things strike me about this show. First, it’s interesting to hear musical theatre numbers sung without radio mics by trained opera singers. I have long contended that there is no valid distinction between musical theatre and opera. It is all simply musical drama and any differences are often very blurred. Merry Opera’s take on the material in this show cheerfully reinforces that.

Second, it’s splendid to hear such a variety. Some of it is familiar. I have sung the surprisingly difficult The Banquet Fugue from John Rutter’s The Reluctant Dragon myself and it’s a pleasure to hear it done with such slickness and panache. What a stylistic contrast though with Harry Champion’s music hall number Oh! That Gorgonzola Cheese or Quirk and Morsley being  wittily outrageous in the well known Have Some Madeira M’Dear  by Flanders and Swann, or Quirk and Olsworth-Peter in a dead-pan take on I Gave My Love a Cherry. The four of them do as well with American-style 1930s close harmony as with Baroque and Bizet’s Omelette Quartet with which the show ends is entertaining.

Third, the choreography (by Carole Todd) provides quite a lot of clever grouping and movement so that the show works reasonably well visually as well as aurally.

There is a problem, though with the linking narrative with which John Ramster, director has tried far too hard. The show is themed on three inter-related human activities and some of the dialogue and flirting amongst characters between sung numbers is excruciatingly contrived and hammy, The show would be better with much less of that and an additional sung item in each half.

Moreover, the show takes a while to get going and some of the singing is wobbly in the first fifteen minutes – or at least it was at the performance I saw. The second half is both better structured and more assured.

Generally speaking though, Eat, Drink, Love! was a very pleasant way of spending a Sunday afternoon.

Susan Elkin