Cherry Town, Moscow
WNO Youth Opera, Cardiff Bay
 

YOUTH will have its day and Cherry Town, Moscow, is a bonkers and brilliant production in equal measure.

Welsh National Opera’s Youth Opera have put together a must-see production of Soviet composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s operetta.

The unprepossessing story is about the building of high-rise blocks of flats in Moscow to solve the post-war housing crisis.

But in the hands of the young company working alongside experienced WNO hands in conductor Alice Farnham and director Daisy Evans this is a hilarious take on the communist maestro’s production.

Shostakovich was not keen on his own comedic take on Soviet bureaucracy and the joy of people getting their own apartment in the sky, but this is a wonderful operetta.

Think Gilbert and Sullivan on steroids as the youthful company sing and dance their way across a story arc as the block of flats in Cheryomushki is finished and the patient tenants queue for their keys to a better life.

Our story starts properly in the Museum of the History of the Reconstruction of Moscow where Boris and Sergei, exuberantly sung and performed by Dafydd Allen and Rhydian Jenkins, bemoan their lack of luck in love.

Boris attempts to woo museum tour guide Lidochka, sung by Rusne Tuslaite. Lidochka’s father, Semyon, sung by Tomos Owen Jones, arrives to say the large Moscow house he, his daughter, and countless other families, including Boris, live in is to be demolished.

But Sergei reads the eviction notice and finds they are to be rehoused in the new high-rise flats in Cherry Town.

The story meanders around the various love interests, but the cast’s movements are choreographed in such a bonkers way that you cannot help but laugh out loud.

None more so than when the famous onion domes of St Basil’s Cathedral, next to Lenin’s tomb in Red Square, are recreated by cast members wearing dome-shaped hats and jigging around.
There is also a laugh-out-loud car journey in a Zim limousine that is as crazy as it is funny.

Of course, the programme notes disapprove of the Soviet Union and sniffily inform of us of the bureaucratic nature of its housing system.

But anybody who has experienced the vagaries of the British housing market will not be taken in by such hypocrisy.

Of course there is a happy ending, and the joyous music of Shostakovich and the sheer exuberance and humour of the production will warm the hardest heart.

This is a spectacular production and deserves to be brought out for an extended run to allow more to enjoy. Bravo, WNO Youth Opera.