Joan Sutherland Theatre, Sydney Opera House
August 10, 2018

Three years before they put Porpoise Spit on stage in Muriel’s Wedding the Musical, director Simon Phillips and set and costume designer Gabriela Tylesova set their sights on another seaside town, this one near Naples, in a new production of Rossini’s 1814 comedy Il Turco in Italia – The Turk in Italy. The production was a hit when it opened in 2014, Phillips moving the action to the 1950s, affectionately mining dated ideas about gender for comedy, and playing fast and loose with the surtitles – he translates Rossini’s Italian into Australian idioms like “we’re on a pig’s wicket” and isn’t afraid to make 19th-century euphemisms a little more literal. In this revival by Andy Morton, the show has lost none of its sparkle.

Rossini’s comedy sees poet Prosdocimo working as a waiter and searching for a plot for a comedy he’s writing – a fun framing device that binds the tangled love interests, and one which Phillips leans into with post-modern glee. Prosdocimo’s aging employer Don Geronio is concerned about the wandering eye of his wife Fiorella who is quite taken with the newly arrived Selim. Selim’s ex Zaida...