Last night I watched a 1983 BBC production of Offenbach's Orpheus in the Underworld, a very uneven performance, but much better than either the French or German versions I've watched this week. The production had an interesting concept: a performance of the opera bouffe for Emperor Napoleon III and Empress Eugenie. The emperor, played by my close personal friend Denis Quilley, falls asleep and dreams that he is Jupiter and the members of his court become the gods on Mt Olympus. This set up well all the anachronisms within the piece itself, which was a satire of that court and promiscuity of Napoleon III. Napoleon Buonaparte made an appeara Act IV party in hell..
Besides Quilley, the cast included Honor Blackman as Empress Eugenie/Juno, Lillian Watson (whom I met while recording John McGlinn's Babes in Toyland in 2001), and Christopher Gable as Mercury. The other roles were sung by leading British singers, and the piece was conducted by Alexander Faris, who not only led the 1960s revivals of Offenbach at English National Opera but also conducted in the West End the 1958 production of Candide, which featured Denis Quilley in the title role, and the big hit Robert and Elizabeth.
The producer was George Walker, whose big project was to do for the BBC a complete, very uneven, series of Gilbert & Sullivan operas, which also suffered from bizarre casting - Joel Grey in The Yeoman of the Guard and Vincent Price in Ruddigore among others - and strange concepts.
