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With Lubano's comic aria 'My wife is insane' ('Alle Wetter! O ihr Gotter! Lubanara ist verrückt') Leigh Melrose set the comedy nicely on the road, as did Lubanara's which preceded (the role very agreeably sung by the Albanian-born, Chethams and RNCM-trained soprano Teuta Koço), 'So ein schönes Weibchen kann'. You can hear the Magic Flute rhythms in the halting metre -- midway between trochaic and iambic: the idiom is essentially the same.

There's witty use of a bicycle (and later a simulated flying, borne by four chorus acolytes, to engineer two mercurial entries by the 'Genius' Astromonte's messenger (Katherine Bond), clad in full gold attire including chauffeur's hat, and a direct descendant of not just umpteen Gluck, Rameau or Cavalli divine messengers but Britten's Western Union boy ('a telegram ... a telegram ...') in Paul Bunyan. This (if intended) was the kind of sly side-allusion that this Philosophers' Stone so badly needed, and indeed deserved. It's like Plautus or Aristophanes: it needs contemporary allusion, irony and deliberate, conscious anachronism to make it forcefully funny. Here was one such instance, or the beginnings of one. The opera cried out for more.

Melrose's Lubano finds himself lumbered with horns for most of the latter part of Act I (compare the parallel gagging of Papageno); yet more ideas were needed -- Schikaneder would have had masses of them -- to sustain this extended sequence (the later caging of Lubano, in Act 2, was decidedly slicker).

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