The Opera Locos at Sadler’s Wells
Some shows ask you to suspend disbelief. The Opera Locos asks you to suspend dignity, briefly, then rewards you with the kind of laughter that makes strangers look at each other like co-conspirators. Created by the Spanish company Yllana, in collaboration with Rami Eldar, it collides physical comedy, opera classics and pop, delivered by five genuinely top-tier singers. It’s an accurate promise, and the evening proves it has real craft behind the chaos.
This is comedy opera with clown bones and serious vocal muscle. Five performers arrive with the heightened emotions of grand opera, then puncture the form from the inside. Vanity, rivalry, romance, and theatrical one-upmanship become the fuel, while the music stays the engine. It moves fast, it moves physically, and it stays readable, even when it’s being deliberately daft.
Voices first, always
The first delight is how seriously the show takes the singing. Even when someone is wobbling about like a broken marionette, the vocal line stays clean. The cast for this run includes María Rey-Joly, Mayca Teba, Jesús Álvarez, Enrique Sánchez-Ramos, and Michaël Koné, and the show’s real trick is that it never makes opera the joke. The joke sits around it: in the bodywork, the expressions, the absurd micro-gestures, the rivalry, the flirting, the desperate need to be adored.
For opera newcomers, it’s a gentle way in. You get the thrill of famous operatic moments without the feeling you need a handbook. For seasoned opera-goers, the pleasure is hearing genuine technique delivered with a grin while chaos swirls around it.
Costume chaos and precision slapstick
Visually, it’s gloriously heightened: madcap costumes, clown-like make-up, and a cartoon energy that gives the performers permission to go big. The physical comedy is skilful rather than messy. It’s timed, drilled, and cleanly executed, with laughs arriving from small, precise choices as often as from larger set pieces.
There’s a running thread involving drunkenness and melodrama, including a moment where a character veers towards suicidal intent and the scene spirals into farce as everything goes wrong. It’s pitched as comic catastrophe rather than bleakness, yet it’s a darker shade of humour in an otherwise buoyant evening.
Clear story arcs beneath the chaos
The plot threads are easy to follow, and that’s one of the show’s strengths. Romance develops, feelings go unreturned, loyalties shift, and by the time the final connections click into place, it feels earned. Even at its most frantic, there’s a clear sense of who wants what, and who is getting in the way.
After the interval: the opera “lesson” that actually works
Audience participation arrives after the interval, and it’s handled with real confidence. One of the cast leads an opera “lesson”, teaching sections of the audience to sing lines and pulling different parts of the auditorium into the same rhythm. It’s the kind of thing that can curdle into awkwardness in lesser hands. Here, it feels joyful, inclusive, and oddly uplifting. People relax into it. The theatre becomes a single, noisy chorus for a few minutes, and you can feel the room enjoying itself.
It also does something quietly clever: it takes opera out of its glass case. Suddenly it’s communal, unprecious, and full of laughter, which makes everything that follows land harder.
When opera morphs into pop
Near the end, the show starts slipping between opera and modern pop, letting a classic line tilt into something contemporary with a grin. It feels like fun rather than a left turn, partly because the performers commit to both worlds with the same confidence. The transitions are funny because they’re done so cleanly.
When the Front Row Becomes the Love Story
I was seated front row, centre, unaware it was about to become an active role, and that I’d be drafted in as the Carmen’s love interest.
Throughout the show, Carmen (Mayca Teba) kept circling back to the front row with a running flirtation, teasing and pursuing me in quick bursts. The best gag, repeated with exquisite timing, involved offering me a single red rose and then whipping it away the instant my hand moved. It was embarrassing, properly funny, and the whole audience howled.
By the time I was asked up onto the stage near the end of that arc, it felt like the show cashing in a promise it had been planting all evening. Stepping onto a stage in front of a packed house takes a bit of nerve, yet the cast handle these moments brilliantly. You’re guided, held inside the rhythm of the comedy, and never left stranded. I went along with it, played my part, and came back down with that fizzing “did that really just happen?” feeling, shared by a room already in stitches.
It was also a neat personal echo. This is the second time I’ve ended up on the London stage. The first was circa 2017, when I was forcibly dragged onto the stage, and I sang a solo during Five Guys Named Moe at the temporary Marble Arch Theatre. Tonight was less singing, more rose-based comic torture.
Verdict
The Opera Locos is an ideal gateway for newcomers to opera and a bright, silly, highly skilled night out for anyone who enjoys theatre that moves fast and plays close to the audience. You don’t need surtitles to stay with it, because the storytelling is physical and clear, with enough spoken English threaded in to keep the narrative anchored.
Most importantly, it’s properly funny. The kind of laughter that keeps building until the whole theatre feels lighter on its feet.
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
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- Yllana – The Opera Locos – Sadlers Wells Theatre Feb 2026
Cast & Creatives
- Showing - 24–28 February 2026, 7:30pm
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Sadler’s Wells, Rosebery Avenue, London EC1R 4TN
https://www.sadlerswells.com/whats-on/yllana-the-opera-locos-swt/ - Company: Yllana (Spain) - https://yllana.com/en/
- Cast:
María Rey-Joly as Maria
Mayca Teba as Carmen
Jesús Álvarez as Alfredo
Enrique Sánchez-Ramos as Enrique
Michaël Koné as Franelli
- Creative Team:
Original idea: Yllana and Rami Eldar
Creation and direction: Yllana
Artistic direction: David Ottone and Joe O’Curneen
Musical direction: Marc Álvarez and Manuel Coves
Choreography: Carlos Chamorro
Set design: Tatiana de Sarabia, David Ottone and Yeray González
Costume design: Tatiana de Sarabia
Lighting design: Pedro Pablo Melendo
Sound design: Luis López de Segovia
Make-up design: Tatiana de Sarabia, Sara Álvarez and ARTMAKERS
Music recorded by: Orquesta Sinfónica VERUM
Production photos: Lighuen De Santos
A Joyous Opera Crash-Course with Pinpoint Slapstick
Summary
The Opera Locos takes opera out of its glass case and turns it into a full-bodied night of laughter, driven by five seriously accomplished singers and razor-sharp physical comedy. It’s welcoming to newcomers, packed with visual invention, and the post-interval audience “lesson” is handled with confidence and charm. A couple of gags flirt with darker territory, yet the overall effect is buoyant, skilful, and hugely entertaining.
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