Aldeburgh festival's very own end-of-the-pier show comes courtesy of the Genesis Foundation. Raymond Yiu's The Original Chinese Conjuror, with a libretto by Lee Warren, was one of the pieces singled out for development at the Genesis Opera workshops. A pacy, imaginative piece of music-theatre, it's easy to see why it caught the eyes and ears of the selection panel, and Martin Duncan's staging of the premiere for Aldeburgh Almeida Opera is appropriately slick and smart.
The true story of William Robinson, who achieved enormous fame in the music halls of Edwardian England as the Chinese conjuror Chung Ling Soo, certainly has enough emotional twists and turns to be operatic. Yiu's piece charts Robinson's life from his origins as an unsuccessful conjuror in late 19th-century American theatre through his work as an assistant to another stage magician, to the creation of the persona through which he achieves fame and fortune, cut short by his death on stage when his most famous trick of catching a bullet in his teeth goes horribly wrong.
It's a tale of illusion and delusion, personal and professional, told in snappy, sharply characterised scenes, linked by narratives from Alexander Herrmann, the "Napoleon of Necromancy" with whom Robinson learned his trade. The text is playful and witty, and so is much of the music, full of pastiches, quotes and parodies, careering through a spectrum of styles from Cole Porter to Maxwell Davies. It is, perhaps, 10 minutes too long, but it's a smart piece of post-modern vaudeville with first-rate performances, especially from Richard Morris as Robinson, counter-tenor Andrew Watts as his "translator" Chai Ping, and Sophie Louise Dann as the long-suffering wife Dot. There are some neat conjuring tricks, too.
· Ends tomorrow. Box office: 01728 687110. Then at the Almeida Theatre, London N1 from July 1. Box office: 020-7359 4404.
