OPERA NORTH rounded off its 2009 season at Newcastle with this blockbusting musical comedy about people and their search for a dream home in Fifties Moscow.

It may not sound too riveting, but Shostakovich’s forgotten opera, written in 1959, premiered at a time when the Soviet Union had emerged from feudalism into an industrial era with expectations of beating America into space.

The story centres around a new housing estate, which is being constructed on the outskirts of Moscow, and its crowd of aspiring tenants. The tenants are varied Soviet types, including the local party bureaucrat who commandeered an extra flat for his mistress, leaving the legitimate tenants on the street.

Lusya, a female construction worker, rallies the tenants to complain to the authorities, causing the bureaucrat and the greedy caretaker to be demoted to floor sweepers.

The western interpretation of a piece written under a Stalinist society may not be what Shostakovich literally meant, but, as seen through the eyes of a westerner 50 years later, this was a fun piece with a light score that ranged from dance music to lyrical ballads and operatic arias.

Ed Waugh