⭐️⭐️
Festival Theatre, Edinburgh
Well. That was weird. And not the fun kind of weird.
Opera Ventures and Scottish Opera brought The Galloping Cure to the Festival Theatre tonight as part of the International Festival’s Anderson Opera Series, and on paper it had everything going for it. Missy Mazzoli, Royce Vavrek and Tom Morris reuniting after Breaking the Waves. A genuinely urgent subject, the opioid crisis, wrapped up in an allegory about a travelling carousel man called Lucky Mack promising miracle cures. Stuart Stratford conducting the Orchestra of Scottish Opera. All the ingredients of something that should have flattened me.
And technically, it very nearly did. The staging is gorgeous, genuinely the most striking thing I’ve seen on a stage this festival & fringe, and the lighting does a phenomenal job of putting you inside a drug induced episode. I’ve never actually had one myself, but if the visuals here are anything to go by, I’m in no rush to test that theory. Every element of the execution was sharp as a tack.
Where it lost me was the horses. The central metaphor of galloping carousel horses as the pull of addiction started off intriguing and then got weird. Then a lot weird. Then genuinely A LOT WEIRD. I spent most of the first half completely adrift, and it was only Bryan leaning over in the interval to explain what I’d actually just watched that things clicked into any kind of shape. Even then, still a lot weird.
I’d been told the second half was where it all comes together and you start really enjoying yourself. That did not happen for me. I was mostly just grateful I was far enough back that the cast couldn’t clock my face, because I don’t think it was giving rapt attention.
The music itself has real moments. There are stretches where the arrangement is genuinely beautiful, and every so often Mazzoli slips in these trance influenced beats that had me properly won over. But the singing is a different story. Dissonant vocals can be striking in small doses. Stretched across two and a half hours it stops being striking and starts being an endurance test.
I’m not an opera person to begin with, though I try to go in with an open mind every time. This one didn’t convert me. And beyond personal taste, I left unconvinced this production does justice to the issue it’s actually about. There are hundreds of thousands of people living with this epidemic, and the operatic style here throws up such a thick layer of artistic facade that the message struggles to get through it.
Beautifully staged, genuinely difficult to connect with. Two stars out of five.