Bel Canto Opera production at The Playhouse (From Wilts and Gloucestershire Standard)

Bel Canto Opera production at The Playhouse

BEL CANTO Opera's latest production, Don Pasquale by Donizetti, will be performed at The Playhouse, Cheltenham on February 26 and 27, and March 1,2,4 and 5.

Performances begin at 7.45pm except for Sunday, February 27 when there is a matinee at 5pm.

Donizetti's Don Pasquale is regarded as his finest comic opera, full of smashing tunes with a funny and timely story of bolshi under-achieving youth in conflict with a disapproving and autocratic old fogey.

In Tom Boyd's witty, wily and with-it new English libretto, the fun and games take place in Italian Soho during the swinging sixties, when girls in mini skirts were on the pill, boys in flares were on the make, and the generation gap had widened into a canyon.

A quartet of top professional singers makes this year's Bel Canto production a musical feast as well as a bundle of laughs.

Don Pasquale is sung by the buffo bass Deryck Hamon, who will be remembered as Master Page in the 2004 production of The Merry Wives of Windsor.

Pamela Hay, who played his daughter, Anne Page, in the same production, now takes the role of Noreen, the dollybird bride who turns Pasquale's life into a living hell.

Paul Carey Jones is Doctor Malatesta, the family friend who, together with Noreen, stitches up the old man in a hilarious plot to make Pasquale relent and allow her to marry her true love, his nephew Ernesto, sung by the young tenor Stephen Brown.

The Bel Canto orchestra is conducted by music director William Bell and the production is directed by Tom Boyd.

Tickets from the box office on 01242 522852.