The City of London Festival was claiming nobody had staged it since the first run ended in 1875. Surely such a combination of genius and subject would have resurfaced if it really existed. Yet it’s there in the biographies, a commission for London, Offenbach’s only work with English words. The conductor Cem Mansur has been trying to put it on for years, and now, backed up with heroic bouts of copying from the unpublished manuscript by City of London Sinfonia player Peter Merry, here it was back in town. It looked like an April Fool’s trick – an English pantomime by the great musical satirist of Paris, Jacques Offenbach. The City of London Festival was claiming nobody had staged it since the first run ended in 1875. Surely such a combination of genius and subject would have resurfaced if it really existed.

Yet it’s there in the biographies, a commission for London, Offenbach’s only work with English words. The conductor Cem Mansur has been trying to put it on for years, and now, backed up with heroic bouts of copying from the unpublished manuscript by City of London Sinfonia player Peter Merry, here it was back in town.
Wednesday’s concert performance quickly showed it was the real thing. A flute sings out one of Offenbach’s easeful melodies in triple time. The chorus introduces our hero: “Dick WhittingTON/ Dick WhittingTON/ Dick Dick Dick Dick Dick WhittingTON” – the kind of surreal prosody that no other composer would dare Another chorus praises British food. Characters appear called The Bell Ringer of Bow and King Bambouli XIX of Bambouli. There’s a scene in Highgate, which is apparently somewhere on Hampstead Heath, and a harvest with Old English Partridge Shooting.

Dick’s cat sparks off a love affair and saves a Pacific nation.Absurd it may be, but like Offenbach’s La Vie Parisienne it contains some sharp demolition of national stereotypes. Maybe too sharp for the Brits, who preferred the emerging, softer satire of Gilbert and Sullivan, just as they would rather have Bill Bryson’s misty-eyed view than Paul Theroux’s beady vision. Probably the language killed the operetta’s chances back in Paris. Whatever the reason, Dick Whittington turns out to be Grade I Offenbach, running at high speed through several dazzling sequences of numbers and building unstoppable momentum in the classic middle act, which has everything from shipwrecks to island politics, populated with ridiculous and memorable inventions from Dorothy the Cook to a horny princess.With typical nonchalance, Dorothy has the best aria, but there are character ensembles for everybody, including an ear-teasing double duet for lovers’ farewell and traders’ money-counting – this is a Britain of people on the make. At the end, Offenbach simply throws away one big tune after another as he runs out of time to re-use them, culminating in a rousing finale that manages to fuse the grandeur of oratorio with the cheek of music-hall.An amused cast brought it off with flair, from Sally Bruce-Payne’s striding Dick – a drag role, like Offenbach’s Robinson Crusoe or the pantomime version – to the versatile tenor Kevin West, doubling up as bell-ringer and a strange Scot called The MacPibroch.

Constance Hauman took care of both the love interests, Nerys Jones relished Dorothy’s big moment. Narration was substituted for dialogue, properly full of topical wisecracks, rather smugly delivered by John Suchet. The CLS and Mansur played with poise and pace, though the Mansion House acoustic swallowed up most of H B Farnie’s libretto. Strangely, they haven’t been able to arrange a repeat performance. But Dick is a major Offenbach rediscovery, and the world’s addicts deserve the chance to find out..