UWOpera.

"This is the biggest cast we've ever put out there," says Theodore Baerg, Associate Professor at the University of Western Ontario's Don Wright Faculty of Music, about this winter's UWOpera production of Lehar's perennially popular 1905 operetta, Die lustige Witwe (Feb. 10-19). For climactic scenes in each of the three acts, there were up to 40 singers and dancers on the Talbot Theatre stage, their movements masterfully choreographed by Gerri Teal.

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With five performances over two weekends, the show quickly sold out, offering Londoners an all-too-rare opportunity to see a fully staged and costumed opera with a talented and immensely energetic cast and a full orchestra, conducted by James McKay. The dozen largest parts were double cast, and since Baerg, the show's producer and director, insisted that each cast should bring their unique strengths to their interpretation, opera-lovers should ideally have caught both presentations. Attending the show's only Sunday matinee, I couldn't have asked for more from soprano Gillian Emberly in the title role and baritone Geoffrey Sirett as her on-again/off-again suitor, Count Danilo.

Set in its original period, with all the women in beautiful gowns and the men in tails or crisp military uniforms, the cast recreated the glamorous ambience of Maxim's nightclub in Paris, complete with lines of kicking can-can girls. In addition to its bounty of marvellous melodies, Die lustige Witwe was originally hailed for its unprecedented eroticism. A century later, the sight of a dancer's bloomers doesn't carry quite the same electrical charge and the work has become a great family show.