Handel’s Messiah: The Live Experience at Theatre Royal Drury Lane review - a lively performance

Handel wasn’t averse to gratuitous display: his Music for the Royal Fireworks and Water Music were spectacles beyond compare for his contemporaries.

His Messiah, on the other hand, was a pious (which isn’t the same as joyless) meditation on Christ’s life. What would he have made of Handel’s Messiah: The Live Experience, with its added dancing, “visual effects” and spoken interludes?

Is it still Handel’s Messiah? If it works, does it matter? It’s presented by Classical Everywhere, an offshoot of Immersive Everywhere, which has worked on such theatrical extravaganzas as Peaky Blinders: The Rise and The Great Gatsby.

They got the basics right: four soloists in fine voice and amply mic’d, a long-established orchestra (English Chamber Orchestra) and a top choir (London Symphony Chorus). Conductor Gregory Batsleer (chorus director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra and artistic director of the London Handel Festival) secured a lively account, on the heavy side but not damagingly so, and the chorus was in fine fettle, especially in the Hallelujah Chorus, which had most of the audience on its feet.

As for the soloists: Cody Quattlebaum’s bass-baritone was as resonantly stern as his name and Idunnu Münch’s voice radiated a consoling warmth. Meanwhile tenor Nicky Spence, looking like a jumpy bouncer, sang with heaven-storming intensity.

And then there was Danielle de Niese, dressed in an array of eccentric costumes. Always striving for extra emotive intensity, she at times pushed beyond the Handelian ideal, but hers was a winningly wholehearted performance.

That’s a recipe for a traditional Messiah performance, but Classical Everywhere aims to present “something totally new”. That’s where the problems began.

Choreographer Tom Jackson Greaves had his three dancers writhing and cavorting distractingly, usually in synchrony, mostly on the beat. The specially written spoken texts found two actors delivering ponderous lines about the precarious relationship between mother and child.

On a screen between orchestra and choir, design company flora&faunavisions projected a “multimedia creation” intending to represent a quasi-mystical view of humanity’s place in the cosmos. Instead the images resembled mildly funky screensavers.

For this listener, it all fell rather flat, but that was a minority view. When Handel’s endlessly extended “Amen” died away, most of the audience went wild.