The Grand Old Opera House Hotel
Traverse Theatre - 06/08/23
The funniest show I’ve seen for years and yes it has opera in it!
One of my Facebook friends recommended this show after a preview and promised me opera would be in more than the title. I must admit I was initially sceptical because I’ve had many bad experiences of “sending up opera” on the Fringe and some very unfunny plays at the Traverse. So let me begin by saying that Isobel McArthur has written one of the funniest plays I have seen in years and the technical cast and the brilliant actors who bring it to life deserve all the awards it will undoubtedly get from the Fringe, but also the annual CATS awards for the best in Scottish theatre.
The story is that the Grand Old Opera House Hotel used to be an opera house and now is a badly constructed and run modern hotel with operatic ghosts! Into this steps naive young Aaron, a trainee who is subject to the shambolic training methods of the hotel. Aaron falls in love with the operatic voice of someone he thinks is a ghost but is in fact another member of staff who desperately wants to be an opera singer. The plot is of course to bring them together in best operatic tradition but in between to have the most delightful operatic farce that had the big audience forgetting about the uncomfortable seats of the Traverse and laughing constantly for 90 minutes.
It is unfair to pick out any of the actors, but I’ll mention them all as they appear in the cast list. They are Karen Fishwick, Barry Hunter, Laura Lovemore, Christina Modestou, Ann Louise Ross, Betty Valencia and Ali Watt. They were all brilliant actors and some of them quite decent singers. Director Gareth Nichols and composer and musical supervisor Michael John McCarthy and all the other production staff deserve credit for making this operatic farce a very funny show which will delight the opera lovers who read the Edinburgh Music Review as well as Fringe theatre goers who know nothing about opera. Opera lovers will have fun in recognising the many different operas that are lovingly used as scene setters in this affectionate farce and laughing at the operatic characters depicted on stage, including a fine looking Wagnerian Valkyrie!
The Edinburgh Music Review occasionally ventures into musical theatre but rarely onto the Festival Fringe, but in this case we can unequivocally say, ‘Don’t miss this delightful show!’
It runs till August 27th at the Traverse and it’s a hit, a palpable hit!
