Paul Bunyan packed with 'deliciously funny' lines (Image: Genevieve Girling)
The Alexandra Palace Theatre began life in 1875 as a magnificently engineered stage for theatrical spectacles, with the best of Victorian special effects allowing performers to fly through the air and appear and disappear as if by magic. Sadly, it was soon matched by more central London theatres and it ceased to operate as a theatre when Ally Pally, as it became known, became the centre of BBC broadcasting in the mid-1930s. It reopened after extensive renovation last December, which has wisely avoided the temptation to rebuild and redecorate the place but instead retains much of the apparently shambolic design of a former music hall.
The current production makes imaginative use of the huge space offered by the theatre, with performers making appearances in the gallery and between the aisles as well as on the stage, giving the whole opera the feel of a very up-market pantomime.
Paul Bunyan was the first of Benjamin Britten's operas, written in 1941 in the United States where the composer spent the war years. Envisaged originally as an all-American musical for a high school production, it was a collaboration between the composer and the poet WH Auden who wrote the lyrics.
As one might expect, the lyrics are very fine, with some deliciously funny lines which included rhymes such as 'Scandinavia' and 'behaviour'. Less attention, however,
