A month ago I was chomping through a staging of Wozzeck set in a baked bean factory. Now here’s Rossini’s comic The Italian Girl in Algiers set in a television studio grinding out a low-budget Latino soap opera about the filthy rich of the Mediterranean.

As Rossini didn’t watch much television — they had so few channels in 1813 — he might have been a little baffled. Yet there’s method in the madness of Scottish Opera and NBR New Zealand Opera’s new production, directed by Colin McColl, one of New Zealand’s leading lights. Hitching opera to modern popular culture allows you to woo the young and smash the notion of opera as the elite’s jewel box. And television? A perfect excuse to bring on high-tech digital technology — almost every opera designer’s dream.

McColl’s frolic is sweetly inventive, at least until the libretto’s invention gets stuck in Act II. As assistants scuttle about, the cast of Algiers, the Latino soap, strut around a bare green space to a digital camera hoisted beyond the theatre’s proscenium arch. Above their heads, on a generous screen, the audience sees the camera’s view, but now blended with digital trickery: the white gleam of the medallion-chested Mustafa’s yacht, absurd toy fish circling round, the splash of Mediterranean waves. The screen also houses the surtitles.

Clever stuff here from McColl and the designer Tony Rabbitt, though the audience’s eye sometimes doesn’t know where to focus, and the show’s hyperactive burlesque diminishes the tenderness built into Rossini’s score. Scottish Opera’s cast of voices aren’t stellar, but they certainly display spirit. Under the weather on press night, Karen Cargill wasn’t as feisty as the heroine Isabella deserved, yet still carried herself with panache. Julia Riley, stricken voiceless, walked through as Zulma with Alexandra Cassidy prettily singing the notes for her. But no October bug could stop Tiziano Bracci’s swaggering Bey of Algiers, Mustafa, and Thomas Walker’s preening as Lindoro, the soap opera’s hunk, stayed a constant pleasure. Good value from Mary O’Sullivan, too, as the overemotional Elvira.

Wyn Davies conducts with a quiet kind of sparkle. Sometimes on Wednesday pit and stage disagreed about speeds. The biggest blight, though, was the way the fun dribbled away during the laboured climax. But that’s how it is with soap operas. They’re an OK diversion for a while; then you think: “What else is there to watch?” Box office: 0141-332 9000, to Sat, then touring (Inverness, Aberdeen, Edinburgh) to Nov 27

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