In its heyday, operetta was the most popular performing art form in the world, comparable to the blockbuster musicals of today. Frivolous stories set in exotic locations, laced with romance and risqué humour, tickled the fancy. But the frequently ludicrous libretti were essentially a vehicle for the joyous melodies – for it was the music that the audience couldn’t get enough of, with composers happy to borrow freely from other scores to satisfy the public appetite.

Today operetta is languishing because although the music may still sparkle, the plots don’t cut it for modern tastes. Which is why conductor Robert Andrew Greene has come up with Two Weddings, One Bride, which he describes as “an operetta megamix or operetta jukebox”.

Two Weddings One Bride ReviewAndrew Jones, Julie Lea Goodwin and Nicholas Jones in Two Weddings, One Bride. Photograph © Prudence Upton

Nursing a long-standing affection for the genre, Greene has loosely based the plot of Two Weddings, One Bride on an 1874 operetta called Giroflé-Girofla by Charles Lecocq – a prolific French composer and rival of Jacques Offenbach, one of the great purveyors of 19th-century operetta. Writing in the programme, Greene says...