Bernstein’s Candide is the operetta that ought to work, but never quite does. Voltaire’s featherlight cakewalk through human misery, set to tunes from the West Side Story guy: what’s not to like? And what can be so wrong with its twinkle-toed score that the combined rewriting efforts (and this is not remotely the full list) of Lillian Hellman, Dorothy Parker and Stephen Sondheim have all failed to make it work as theatre? For my money it’s the ending. Voltaire coolly pricks his own bubble and tells us to get on with tending our gardens. Bernstein, the all-American idealist, just can’t, and he kills the whole thing dead with ‘Make Our Garden Grow’, a Hallmark moral drenched in gooey musical uplift. Unless you can solve that, Candide simply can’t be fixed.

But Welsh National Opera’s new production got astonishingly close. It’s unclear whose ideas came first – the director James Bonas or the French animator and video designer Grégoire Pont – but together, they’re dynamite. The orchestra was on stage, with Pont’s animations projected on a translucent curtain: a cheerful, constantly evolving storybook world that doubled as set, special effects and even a few of the minor characters. It’s hard to convey just how utterly delightful it was – how perfectly Pont’s lively chalkboard figures complemented the cartoon bustle of Bernstein’s music, and counterpointed the gleeful parade of atrocities that makes up the story. (We were emailed a list of content warnings pre-show; that the work, for example, would include a representation of the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Too soon?)

Anyway, the live cast acted around the animation, occasionally slipping behind the screen to become part of the 2D picture – prompting gasps of delight from the audience. Tech and opera can be an awkward fit, but when it’s as funny, as imaginative and as stunningly realised as this, let’s hope it’s the future. Assuming, that is, that the direction is also as brisk as Bonas’s, the conducting is as snappy as it was on this occasion under Karen Kamensek, and that the cast can nail their high notes as brilliantly as Claudia Boyle’s ballsy Cunégonde. Ed Lyon brought wide-eyed sincerity to Candide’s guileless lyricism and Madeleine Shaw played the Old Lady with a Lady Bracknell hauteur which added an unexpected level of sauciness to ‘I Am Easily Assimilated’.

As for the finale; well, in the absence of Bernstein to authorise a rewrite there isn’t much that anyone can do about that. But this staging generated such an irresistible swell of goodwill and delight that you went out laughing regardless. The economics of subsidised opera are inscrutable and it seems bizarre that WNO has lavished such effort on a potential smash, only to slip it out for a brief late-season tour to Brecon, Truro and Brum. If ENO got their paws on a hit as bankable as this they’d revive it every other season for the foreseeable future, and they’d be dead right.

There was inventive use of video in Jonathan Dove’s new opera Itch, which premièred last week at Opera Holland Park. In Stephen Barlow’s production the set is a colossal periodic table of the elements, which lights up to illustrate the schoolboy hero’s big aria about the wonders of chemistry. It’s based on children’s books by Simon Mayo (yes, the ex-Radio One DJ), and it’s incredibly well-meaning. Dove’s shimmering, minimalist-lite score sounds exactly as you’d expect; this is his 18th opera (or thereabouts), and at this point the idiom feels reassuringly familiar. Of course you could say the same for Rossini, Donizetti and (god knows) Handel.

So it’s elegantly written, with dazzling episodes for stratospheric soprano (Rebecca Bottone as a wicked executive) and dreamy rhapsodies for the countertenor James Laing as a hippy beachcomber. Yet despite two likeable leads (Adam Temple-Smith and Natasha Agarwal, surprisingly believable as school-age siblings) and some enjoyable onstage pops and bangs – Stem subjects are fun, kids! – the result falls between two stools. Itch is too violent for children, but the dramatic stakes feel too low for adults, and a would-be redemptive ending falls curiously flat. The Holland Park crowd, in fairness, seemed to love it.

It’s never easy to walk the line between levity and depth, but at Garsington, a revival (by Rosie Purdie) of Paul Curran’s 2019 production of The Bartered Bride showed how it can be done, with every cast member (including the whole chorus) presented as an individual with their own back story and character arc. It’s remarkable how that brings the opera’s village world to life – giving emotional weight, in turn, to the rustic romance of Jenik (a plausibly laddish Oliver Johnston) and Marenka (Pumeza Matshikiza; on radiant voice, and every bit the bombshell). The circus scenes in Act Three were as gasp-inducing as before, the choral dances were a lot of fun and Jac van Steen conducted. Result: happiness.