The Fabulist may be billed as a musical, but this delightful entertainment is a musical of a different kind, a tongue-in-cheek reimagining of an eighteenth century opera, The Imaginary Astrologer, a favourite of the Empress Catherine the Great. Its composer, Paisiello, spent six years in St Petersburg at her invitation before moving to Paris and writing the music for Napoleon’s coronation.
While retaining the main themes of the conflict between science and magic and a young woman wanting to wed against her father’s wishes, James P Farwell’s version transposes the action to 1929 Tuscany, where filmmaker sisters Clarice and Cassandra are making subversive movies—the current one looks like a 'Carry On' version of the Fall of Troy, though Cassandra describes it as “refracting reality through the dreams of Achilles”.
Shields’s colourful design sets the mood with cotton wool clouds buttoned like sofas, cut-out scenery showing its backside, ready to spin round from film studio to become the home of the scientist Count Petronius and his daughters with his fine new telescope and no fewer than three orreries.
Self-styled fabulist (posh for magician) Julian, passing himself off as the Great Agrofontido when he’s actually only a learner, and his chum Pupuppini barge onto the film set and get involved as extras. They are trying to keep out of the clutches of the Church, which is rooting out magicians (Mussolini has just signed the Concordat that increased Papal power over culture).
It is love at first sight for Julian (Dan Smith) and Clarice (Réka Jónás) with a courtship of deftly done magic tricks offering red-rose romance. The attraction between Constantine Andronikou’s Pupuppini and Lily de la Haye’s loud-hailer director Cassandra burns more slowly. James Paterson’s eccentric Count may try to control things, but he’s a doting dad and a pushover really, though they all have to be on their guard when his brother, the fascist Cardinal Bandini, is around. Stuart Pendred makes him delightfully evil as he searches for heretics in the audience and experiments with the Inquisition’s electric chair (so much more humane than a bonfire). He claims he only missed being Pope by one vote.
Amongst all the mayhem, Farewell makes Il Duce and his regime an ever-present background. Director John Walton interweaves threat and laughter in a production that relishes its craziness from its self-conscious rhyming to its Trojan Horse and delights in its operatic extravagance with Julian and Pupuppini roped together as Greek space extras, jerking each other to the front as they take over the vocal line, but most of all it celebrates Paisiello’s music, splendidly sung and played, a real treat.