Opera review: La Cenerentola, Aotea Centre

Amelia Berry as Clorinda, Rachelle Pike as Tisbe and Sarah Castle as Angelina. Photo / Neil Mackenzie

New Zealand Opera's La Cenerentola is a captivating night in theatreland.

Just last week, director Lindy Hume was describing Rossini as a genius who didn't muck around. Nor has she with her vivid take on his 1817 fairytale.

Dan Potra's spectacular Don Magnifico Emporium, a fold-out Panavision Curiosity Shoppe, draws gasps from the audience. We had already been taken to a magnificent library and an elegantly sculpted palace garden lay ahead, not to mention foggy London streets populated by cheeky chimney sweeps.

Taiaroa Royal's hip choreography is a bonus, with an umbrella number that could slip into Singing in the Rain. If that good philosopher Alidoro (compellingly played by Ashraf Sewailam) might be credited with bringing Rossini's heroine Angelina into the light, then Matthew Marshall's brilliant lighting makes a theatrical coup of her first transformation.

Wyn Davies, conducting a well-primed Auckland Philharmonia Orchestra, adds the bubbles and fizz that this musical Prosecco needs. The score is substantially complete tonight, apart from the occasional cutting back of coloratura and the brutal chopping of Luca Agolini's plot-spinning recitatives.

La Cenerentola has the enviable pace of a Broadway musical. A constant buzz of chuckles, with numerous outbursts of laughter, runs through this opening performance.

The magnificent Andrew Collis, a buffo master, gets a belly-laugh rhyming "chardonnay" with "Cloudy Bay" in Don Magnifico's aria extolling the pleasures of the vine.

The light, flexible tenor of John Tessier's Don Ramiro and the darker baritone of Marcin Bronikowski's Dandini are a perfectly matched pair.

Tessier's Act II aria, reclaiming his princely status, has the Canadian progressively stripped and dressed by the production's strong-voiced and characterful male chorus that even extends to admitting bearded chambermaids into its ranks.

Adding lively, low comedy, Amelia Berry and Rachelle Pike shed inhibitions without scuffing a semiquaver as Clorinda and Tisbe. With Sarah Castle in the lead, the opera could have been retitled Angelina Triumphans. Beautifully observed and meticulously voiced, her performance eloquently tracks the reclamation of a soul through love and self-confidence, thrillingly caught in her spine-tingling final aria.

A production not to be missed.

What: La Cenerentola
Where: Aotea Centre
When: Saturday, then Wednesday, Friday, Sunday