Jeff Clarke’s marvellous retelling of La Fille du régiment updates Donizetti’s original setting (the Swiss Tyrol in the early 19th century) to the hot, dusty Californian desert of the 1950s, where our abandoned baby Marie is found, not by the French army, but by “The Regiment”: a group of Hell’s Angels who really did exist in Doggett, California from 1948 onwards.

This was a superb, exciting, engaging production which deserves to enter the repertoire immediately.

Click here to read my full review on Bachtrack.

“What do you mean, you’re thinking of marrying our Marie?”