Whoosh! A digital starburst, a sweep of orchestral sound and the stage of the Coliseum is alive with dancing, whirling snowflakes. Floating in the heavens is the soprano Danielle de Niese; below her in the darkness, the truss bridge that we all know – because we’ve all seen It’s a Wonderful Life – is where the turning point of the story will occur, a couple of hours from now. That being the case, the only question is how composer Jake Heggie, librettist Gene Scheer and director Aletta Collins are going to close the circle and get us there. It’s evident from the off that they’re not going to stint either on spectacle or on sentiment.

And quite right too: this is a Christmas opera, and there aren’t too many of those about. English National Opera doubtless wishes that there was a bankable operatic equivalent to The Nutcracker, guaranteed to fill that vast auditorium every December. It’s entirely logical to try to create one, and Heggie’s 2016 movie adaptation is a good fit for the UK’s most pop-savvy opera company. This is not the time for experiments (though it’s barely three years since ENO did Birtwistle’s The Mask of Orpheus). Posterity will sort the wheat from the chaff; meanwhile a new and successful English-language opera by a composer with Heggie’s reputation for accessibility is exactly the sort of thing that a subsidised national company ought to be putting in front of us. The audience, for what it’s worth, looked big, youthful and diverse: all those things that (we now know) the Arts Council of England only pretends to give a stuff about.

Anyhow, Collins has crafted a good-looking show. That opening fantasy sequence is dazzling beyond anything available to Frank Capra back in 1946, and throughout the long flashback of the plot, Giles Cadle’s designs evoke a playful, pastel-coloured American dream where life and fate play out beneath a star-spangled heaven and the pantomime-baddie capitalist Potter conducts his business behind a gigantic dollar bill. The plot follows the contours of the film fairly closely, occasionally opening a scene out to make the most of its operatic potential. A love duet for George Bailey (Frederick Ballentine) and his future wife Mary (Jennifer France) brings Act One to a close and sends you floating out into the interval in a warm, Bohème-like haze of sweetness.

Heggie shoots for the big emotional targets, and generally hits them. The music is frosted with glittering bells and chimes: lush, tonal and frankly romantic, it’s the sonic equivalent of a Starbucks Eggnog Latte. Again, no complaints here: ’tis the season, after all. I could have done without the self-conscious little spasms of syncopation – classical music’s equivalent of dad-dancing. There’s a larger problem, though, in the character of Clara the angel (de Niese). (She was Clarence in the film, but it makes musical sense to introduce another high voice into a male-dominated cast.) De Niese is on stage, wide-eyed and open-mouthed, almost throughout, and her closing scene is kitsch beyond description. We were asked not to reveal the ending: let’s just say that it’s as camp as Christmas.

More problematically, it dilutes the impact of the opera’s last big emotional surge. George Bailey has seen the abyss but what, really, is at stake for an angel? That’s no criticism of de Niese, a diva who was born to sparkle on top of a Christmas tree. But the humanity of the piece, such as it is, lies elsewhere. Ballentine’s George was a plain-speaking everyman, clear, direct and almost painfully sincere throughout a long and taxing role, and lighting up in his scenes with France – whose voice, glowing from within, made a nice contrast with de Niese’s brilliance. Donovan Singletary, as little brother Harry, exuded oaky warmth and Michael Mayes (Potter) slithered menacingly over some of the more sharply characterised vocal writing. The orchestra, under Nicole Paiement, sounded like a million dollars, and ENO could certainly use some of that right now.

There’s often an early seasonal treat to be had from the various music colleges’ end-of-term operas. Louise Bakker’s RCM production of Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld delivered multicoloured silliness with an energetic, fresh-sounding cast from whom Lylis O’Hara (Diana) stood out as a bright and agile coloratura soprano to watch, and the bass Jamie Woollard, as Jupiter, conveyed regal charisma and poise even while dressed in shaggy breeches as a sort of disco bluebottle. Michael Rosewell conducted fizzily, while Anna Yates’s designs presented Hell as a celebrity bachelor pad where the only thing to read is Top Gear magazine. Cerberus (Henry Wright) was a three-headed pug, and when he howled tunelessly along with John Styx (Redmond Sanders) I reckon that Offenbach – who once wrote a whole opera about a singing dog – would have laughed as hard as everyone else.

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