On the night before Halloween, the streets around the Grand Theatre belonged to the students: witches, zombies and the odd clown weaving from pub to pub in noisy packs. Inside, Opera North had a masked mob of its own.
Femi Elufowoju jr’s production, first seen in 2022, is back with a largely new cast. Verdi’s 1851 opera tells of a court jester who mocks the Duke of Mantua’s victims for a living while hiding his own daughter, Gilda, from the world. Cursed by Count Monterone, a father the Duke has wronged, Rigoletto watches his worst fear come true when the Duke seduces Gilda. He pays a hit man, Sparafucile, £20,000 to kill the Duke. But Sparafucile’s sister Maddalena, herself seduced by the Duke, talks him into murdering the next stranger who comes to the door instead. Gilda overhears, and sacrifices herself for the man who ruined her. Rigoletto is left holding his daughter’s body in a sleeping bag. (Opera is not short of bleak endings, but this one is right up there.)
Traditionally Rigoletto is a hunchback. Here his difference is race, and his “deformity” is in his head: the paranoia of a Black man in an overwhelmingly white world, his mind “constantly overworking to his own detriment”, as Elufowoju puts it in the programme. He is an insider at court, happy to join in its boorish laddishness, yet never quite sure whether the joke is on him. It’s a bold idea and it works very well. It gives real weight to a man who is both cruel and cruelly treated, and turns his smothering of Gilda into something driven by fear as much as possessiveness.
All three principals are making their Opera North debuts. Blake Denson, also making his role debut, is superb as Rigoletto. His is a muscular grief, sung in a focused, powerful baritone that carried beautifully to the back of the auditorium, never more so than in the final scene. Raven McMillon’s Gilda is pure and vulnerable. Hers isn’t a heavyweight voice, but the role doesn’t need one. In Caro nome she was the vocal equivalent of the flute that accompanies her: light, clear and sweet. Leonardo Sánchez plays the Duke as a pantomime villain, entitlement personified, and clearly enjoys every minute of it. Vocally he is light and flexible at the top of his range, and he tossed off La donna è mobile with an easy swagger that made you dislike him all the more. Among the returning cast, Sir Willard White delivers Monterone’s curse with a chilling, almost otherworldly authority.
Rae Smith’s modern designs are often striking, and some of the detail invites a second look. Gilda carries a Sainsbury’s bag for life, a symbol perhaps of the everyday world of weekly shops and errands that she, under virtual house arrest, is never allowed to join. (A bag for life, for a girl who isn’t allowed one.) And is the zebra in her bedroom a sign of a childhood stretched out by her father’s fear? Not everything quite lands, though. I’m still not sure what the pizza delivery man added. And for all their creepy clown masks, the abductors looked less like a kidnapping gang than a group in the middle of the Otley Run, creeping about the stage like the pirates in Gilbert and Sullivan’s With cat-like tread. It came across as played for laughs, and got them. But at the point where the drama should be at its most sinister, the farce felt a little jarring.
None of this got in the way of the music. Patrick Lange, Opera North’s Music Director Designate, was in the pit. If this is a taste of what’s to come, the orchestra will be in very capable hands. It played with tautness and urgency throughout, and in the Act III storm the chorus’s wordless voices conjured the wind to ghostly effect.
So, trick or treat? A treat, mostly. Elufowoju first fell for Verdi watching Opera North as a drama student at Bretton Hall, and he says he hopes this production will broaden perceptions of who opera belongs to. Cat-like tread aside, this is a gripping, thoughtful Rigoletto, with a title performance that will stay with me for some time.
Rigoletto is sung in Italian with English titles. It finishes at Leeds Grand Theatre on 31st October before touring to Newcastle Theatre Royal (4th–6th November), the Lowry, Salford Quays (12th and 14th November) and the Theatre Royal, Nottingham (19th and 20th November).
Reviewer: Mark Humphreys
Reviewed: 30th October 2026
North West End UK Rating: