Melons. An absolutely cracking pair of melons, right there on a platter: the centrepiece of the banquet that the chaste, all-female inhabitants of the castle of Formoutiers have provided for their surprise guests, a band of nuns. Except these sisters all seem to be singing well below the stave, and judging from the way she adjusts her crotch, Mother Superior has something more than a chastity belt beneath her habit. We all know where this is going. You can’t get your melons out on stage unless, sooner or later, some great hairy bloke in a wimple is going to shove them down his front. It’s the law.
And if that all sounds a bit, shall we say, fruity, you’ll have to trust me that it’s probably the single image that says most about Cal McCrystal’s new staging of Rossini’s Crusader comedy Le Comte Ory. I mean, what else was he going to do with it? Rossini was a jammy swine, and Le Comte Ory — upcycled from an earlier score by a 36-year-old millionaire on the brink of an extremely comfortable retirement — is as jammy as they come.
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