Review: STILETTO, Charing Cross Theatre

A musical set in the 1730s heyday of Venetian opera ought to be a glamorous glimpse into a different, dangerous era. Stiletto, from the composer behind the classic Disney hero’s journey Mulan, has all the ingredients for that to be the case – simmering rivalries, power struggles, romance and murder. Sometimes, though, the real power struggle is between seedy underworld glamour and the story’s tendency to veer into fairytale schmaltz.

Tim Luscombe’s script revolves around Marco (Jack Chambers), a castrato (one of the many male singers of the period who were forcibly sterilised when young to preserve their treble voices), and his love story with Gioia (Jewelle Hutchinson), a talented, formerly enslaved Black woman.

Both characters have potential as routes into forgotten historical narratives, but remain somewhat underdeveloped. Early ‘I Want’ songs in Matthew Wilder’s score establish Marco as self-confident despite his traumatic past, and Gioia as streetwise and no-nonsense, and we learn little about them to challenge or enhance these impressions.

Certain pacing issues contribute to this problem – in under two hours, the plot manages to encompass Marco’s experience as a promiscuous countess’ protege, his and Gioia’s attempts to sing in a new Gasparini opera, an accidental death and murder trial, and several secondary plots. Marco and Gioia’s relationship is rushed through its flirty enemies-to-lovers phase to make way for more dramatic material in the second act, and the interesting, gender-bending tension of both lovers auditioning for the same (female) role is pushed aside rather abruptly.

Indeed, Marco’s relationship with gender after experiencing castration at a young age feels like a missed opportunity for the script. There are the obligatory “can’t get it up” jokes, and Marco’s eventual decision to concede his female role in the opera to Gioia in order to “make him feel like a man” feels odd in its rigid heteronormativity. Similarly, the racism faced by Gioia feels only skindeep; one has to suspend disbelief slightly to buy Gioia’s near-instant acceptance as a singer by Venice’s wealthy tastemakers.

Sometimes, both script and score shine the brightest when they aren’t focused on the central couple, but on the gaggle of supporting characters from Venice’s elite, centred around Marco’s patron the Countess Azurra (Kelly Hampson) and her tyrannical husband Pietro (Douglas Hansell). These are not especially complex villains, but their exploitative financial projects and crude approaches to love affairs offer a dryly humorous look at aristocratic hypocrisy.

Some of Wilder’s belty vocal lines and Luscombe’s banal lyrics (rhyming “brain”, “pain”, and “insane” sticks out in particular) owe a little too much to Disney’s musical theatre offering, and given how able Chambers and Hutchinson are in their falsetto registers, you’d hope that the score would take more cues from its operatic source material.

That being said, the duet “Without Me” and its clever reprise “Without You” are highlights for how they slightly complicate the narrative of Pietro as villain and Azurra as friend to the heroes. In witty repartee, the couple’s shallowness, resentment, and ultimate codependence are exposed.

An able cast carry all of this, with standouts to be found in Hampson’s sultriness that never dips far into stereotype, and Greg Barnett as Marco’s mentor and erstwhile lover Faustino, perpetually teetering on the edge of a breakdown. Visually, the production design is the rich evocation of the Venetian underworld lacking in the story itself; candlelight makes the arches of the Charing Cross Theatre feel like an intimate salon, and the costume department goes to town on jewel-toned hooped petticoats and powdered wigs.

What this really is is a fable, where heroes achieve their dreams, and villains either gain redemption in helping them, or clean comeuppance. Stiletto may not have the twists and turns and intrigue of many of the operas Marco and Gioia might have sung in, but it’s still decent, if predictable, historical fiction escapism.

Stiletto runs at the Charing Cross Theatre until 14 June

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