With the Bayerische Staatsoper having Die Fledermaus (The Bat), one of its most frequently staged works, and Barrie Kosky, with his love of operetta, engaged to direct it, this show was a hot ticket in Munich in 2023.
The story in its simplified version is thus: society gent Gabriel von Eisenstein once played a joke on his friend Dr Falke, leaving him to walk home alone from a ball dressed as a bat. Now Falke plots his revenge: Eisenstein is due to serve a short prison sentence for a minor offence, but is persuaded to attend Prinz Orlofsky’s party on the night before where he is tricked into flirting with his own wife Rosalinde in disguise.
Meanwhile, she had taken advantage of Gabriel’s absence for a liaison with her singing teacher, Alfred. When the prison governor Frank arrives, in order to avoid a scandal, she pretends he is her husband and Alfred is carted off to gaol. Various assumed and mistaken identities later, including by the maid Adele, Eisenstein is embarrassed by his naivety on two counts, but he and Rosalinde make up, as required in operetta.
The show opens as Eisenstein sleeps and bats flutter everywhere around and even in his bed. The scenery of Judenplatz—a subtle reference to Strauss’s Jewish ancestry—dissolve rather cleverly in a lively opening. The production has its moments after that, but overall, it is a little disappointing and lacking either in ideas or in the ability of the cast to develop them.
After a fairly conventional first act, the second suddenly throws convention aside as bearded ladies and fellahs in frocks turn Orlofsky’s do into a gender-bending rave-up, with the count himself in a startling, blue feathery number—imagine Edna Everage in The Rocky Horror Show. The sequence depends almost exclusively on that concept until a cheeky dance routine for the Thunder and Lightning polka, and Eisenstein makes an unorthodox exit via chandelier.
It says something that the funniest and most successful part of the show has nothing to do with the rest of it, a splendidly absurd dance and body percussion routine by Max Pollak in the spoken role of the gaoler Frosch (Frog, to be followed by five amphibian friends), to open act three, followed by a rather tedious one for Frank in silver lamé briefs.
Diana Damrau as Rosalinde performs the soubrette favourite "Mein Herr Marquis" provocatively, giving the gentleman a slap on the face for good measure, and delivers the "Czardas" with assumed pomposity, but is not at her sparkling best, and counter-tenor Andrew Watts as Orlofsky lacks the necessary vocal heft for a role normally sung by a mezzo.
Best performances come from the perky Katharina Konradi as the maid Adele and Georg Nigl as a vain but likeable Eisenstein, convinced of his ability to slay the ladies.
In the pit, Vladimir Jurowski makes the music dance, with a lightness of touch and a keen sensitivity for the right tempi to drive it forward without feeling rushed.
The lighting for the recorded performance is rather uneven, as is the visual definition when it comes those members of the very large chorus at the rear or the periphery of the main focus.