Lavish Entertainment

'The Adventures of Pinocchio'
by Jonathan Dove and Alasdair Middleton,
impresses PATRIC STANDFORD

With The Adventures of Pinocchio, Jonathan Dove has created yet another entertaining fantasy-opera, a sequel to last year's musical tale The Enchanted Pig which he wrote for the Young Vic. Dove's primary output over the last ten years has been theatrical, the airport-comedy Flight being an early fine success that placed his name in the forefront of appealing contemporary English theatre composers whose work is within easy reach of a wide and appreciative public, and much appreciated by performing bodies whose energetic and concentrated input, like that of the Opera North team, feels well rewarded. Not yet fifty, Dove is an accomplished craftsman, and yet he still seems to fall victim to a fault haunting a great many composers -- difficulty in knowing where to stop!

The Adventures of Pinocchio is, like The Enchanted Pig, the result of a close collaboration between Dove and Alasdair Middleton who delved back into the early 1900s and the many fascinating implications in the posthumous success of the novel by Carlo Lorenzini who died in 1890 only a few years after publishing it, and had adopted the pseudonym Collodi. The novel explored all the roguish behaviour of an unruly child, plagued by a conscience and blessed by a protective spirit.

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