Rigoletto in a gentleman’s club

So it’s farewell to the fedoras and adieu to the jukebox. After 32 years of service, Jonathan Miller’s Little Italy staging of Rigoletto has been given the heave-ho by English National Opera and replaced by a younger model. First seen and disliked in Chicago in 2000, then seen and disliked again in Toronto, Christopher Alden’s nearly-new production affords the London audience an opportunity to congratulate itself for being less conservative than the North Americans, thereby mitigating its customary fright at the provocations of Continental Regietheater. Potted palms, Turkish carpets, oil lamps and leather armchairs fill the stage in Michael Levine’s handsome reconstruction of a mid-19th-century oak-panelled gentleman’s club, Alden’s analogue for the court of Mantua. Breathe deeply and you can almost smell the macassar oil.

Verdi’s 1851 adaptation of Victor Hugo’s Le roi s’amuse premièred in the age of Great Exhibitions and freak-shows, scientific progress and the sprawling squalor recorded by Henry Mayhew.