AS A SIMPLE GLANCE at most of them will tell you, there’s not a whole bunch of fun in being an opera critic — so we tend to greet the faintest prospect of joy with breathless hope.
Imagine, then, the bitter gall we had to drink when the summer’s incontestable highlight, a promised “anti-imperialist” staging of HMS Pinafore at the Arcola Theatre, E8, was scrapped. What could have been more timely, more opportune?
Not merely to out the monstrous G&S for slave-driving warmongers, but more piquantly to note the and her sisters to the Dardanelles in his crusade to stop the Russkies from clearing the hardly-Nazi-affiliated-at-all Bashi-Bazouks out of the Balkans.
