Opera on the Run returns to London in the New Year to present The Perfect Picnic, a unique piece of opera theatre, in a limited season at Jermyn Street Theatre from Tuesday 15 January to Saturday 2 February 2008. Set to the music of Mozart and with an effervescently comic new libretto, The Perfect Picnic is a wonderfully light hearted evening of entertainment combining elements of theatre and opera to produce a quintessentially British tale of love and misunderstanding at a deliciously al fresco summer opera gala.Newly redundant accountant David Sterling and his long-suffering girlfriend Sarah Primrose mysteriously receive tickets to an opera gala at which, it transpires, David’s ex-wife and rising opera star, Rachel, is performing. When Rachel’s new boyfriend, the flamboyant celebrity TV designer Michael de Haughton-Tours, lays eyes on Sarah his attention is transferred immediately from the stage to the stalls. It is during the Picnic interval however that events unfold with more drama than the opera itself.Neither opera nor play, neither musical nor music theatre, The Perfect Picnic paves the way for Opera on the Run’s unique brand of opera theatre which fuses genres and melds music and drama in a manner hitherto unseen in the West End. Combining sultry singing, clever comedy and deliciously delightful drama, it’s an English summer’s picnic in the middle of winter and, as such, blurs the boundaries between the seasons at the same time.Opera on the Run’s previous productions include A Comedy of Arias, a modern story told through lyrics set to popular opera arias, Spaghetti Opera which served up a veritable cocktail of opera favourites, and most recently Turning Heads at the Edinburgh Festival, a boisterous comedy of male manners centred around a wild weekend in Amsterdam.Produced by Opera on the Run, The Perfect Picnic is written and directed by Ian Bloomfield and Tim Armstrong-Taylor with music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. The cast features Cheryl Enever as Rachel Sterling, Lynn Marie Boudreau as Sarah Primrose, Tim Armstrong-Taylor as David Sterling, Ian Bloomfield as Michael de Haughton-Tours, and Clare Kinson as Puck. The cast are accompanied by Kelvin Lim at the piano.
