Let’s call it Jane Austen fit for the West End, but with opera singers. The fact that it also serves as a fun ensemble piece for students is also very much in favour of Jonathan Dove’s Mansfield Park, with a neatly telescoped and often witty libretto by Alasdair Middleton. Like his latest work, Uprising, a community opera for Glyndebourne staged at the weekend, it presses all the right buttons for the young, while staying within safe and mostly derivative boundaries.
Act One is delicious: think "A Weekend in the Country" from Sondheim's A Little Night Music, brio set up with sung chapter headings and a fair share of ensemble work for the 10 singers (the orchestration of the four-hands-at-one-piano 2011 original for 13 players is less deft: no focused Britten chamber opera but often thick textured, and still far too dependent on the piano role). Sir Thomas Bertram (Hector Bloggs, excellent) punches out short colonialist credentials, Lady Bertram coos over her (stuffed) pug and later the young people patter out shapely lines against sustained accompaniments. 
It's when we head towards those matters of the heart which help to give Austen (and Mozart opera) depth to social comedy that the response feels a little threadbare. Dramatically, Dove knows exactly what to do: ball music, a well-manipulated scene of letter writing, a cappella refrains for "Volume Two Chapter Five: Follies and Grottoes". Musically, chuntering instrumental lines don't touch the tenderer strains the singers aren't really permitted. And the finale is a bit of a sub-Glass horror, piano arpeggios taking the upper hand.
Yet this still remains a good choice for a Guildhall show. The standouts in the cast I saw were the Bertrams, full-pelt lyric tenor Sang Eup Son as Henry and coloratura soprano Biqing Zhang as Mary (pictured above), and very promising romantic baritone Thomas McGowan as Edmund Bertram, the object of Fanny Price's attentions. She remains an odd void at the heart of it all, which is hardly Julia Merino's fault. The comedy is well handled by Cecily Shaw's Lady Bertram and Dominic Lee's energetic Mr Rushworth. In Dove's score, the other young women have more charm than Fanny; Karima El Damerdasch as Julia Bertram and Georgie Malcolm as Maria Bertram (pictured below) make the most of it. 
It's a shame the staging, by Martin Duncan-Smith, can't often be as elegant; the designs by Anna Reid are resourceful, but too many ungainly props need sliding on and off. The reveal of the house for a minute or two at the end seems like a waste of a fine visual. Duncan-Smith's Guildhall counterpart in the music department, Dominic Wheeler, keeps it all afloat, and the young musicians in the pit play well. A good team effort, at least.
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