A powerful musical fable about addiction that asks an intriguing question: when does music theatre become opera?
Kate Gaul
4 Stars
Venue: Edinburgh Fringe Festival
2026
The opioid crisis is a devastatingly rich subject for opera. Addiction, pain, pharmaceutical greed, desperation and the promise of an easy cure all lend themselves to the heightened world of music theatre. In The Galloping Cure, composer Missy Mazzoli and librettist Royce Vavrek, working from Karen Russell’s original story and directed by Tom Morris, turn the crisis into a darkly comic contemporary fable.
The setting is a fading American town where local doctor Theresa Hart works tirelessly to care for a community that is already hurting. Then Lucky Mack arrives — a charismatic showman with a brightly coloured carousel that promises to cure every ache. The first ride is free. Of course, there is a catch.
Theresa’s daughter Noy is captivated, and soon the whole town is swept up in the euphoric promise of Lucky’s cure.
What begins as pleasure and relief becomes dependence, and the cost of getting off the ride becomes increasingly horrific. The allegory is not subtle — nor does it need to be. The carousel is addiction, pharmaceutical exploitation and the seductive promise that pain can simply be made to disappear.
Mazzoli’s music is the star for me. There are memorable musical ideas that stay with you, alongside an atmosphere that moves between beauty, unease, repetition and something increasingly sinister. The score has the capacity to create the dreamlike, slightly nightmarish world that the story demands.
But despite being billed as an opera, I found myself thinking that The Galloping Cureis perhaps more successful as a play set to music. There are four principal roles and an ensemble, but this is not opera in the grand, multi-voiced sense one might expect from the form. There are no great sprawling set pieces or extended passages of voices colliding and intertwining. Instead, the music frequently sits underneath and around the dramatic action, propelling the story and shaping its emotional atmosphere.
That isn’t necessarily a criticism. It is a contemporary form of music theatre, and there is much to admire in its accessibility. But I did find myself wanting the music and voices to take over more completely — to allow the opera to become something that only opera could be.
The production is visually ambitious. Tom Morris and designer Rebecca Ringst create a strange, decaying world in which the carousel becomes both object and metaphor, with lighting, projection and movement contributing to the increasingly surreal atmosphere.
But here I had another question. The production’s most intriguing visual conceit is also its most literal: the plastic hobby horses. They are the carousel, but they are also the people being carried along by it — the object and the metaphor occupying the same space.
And I wasn’t always convinced that the hobby horses work best in the hands of the performers.
There is something awkward about the actors manipulating them while simultaneously inhabiting the human characters. At times the theatrical device seems to ask the performers to be actors, puppeteers and objects all at once, and I wondered whether this might actually be a compelling argument for a more explicit division of labour: puppeteers alongside actors, rather than asking the actors to do both jobs.
Because the metaphor is strong. The idea of a community literally mounting the machinery of its own addiction is theatrically powerful. I just wasn’t always convinced that the human performers were the best people to animate it.
Nevertheless, The Galloping Cure is an ambitious and timely work, with a terrific musical score and a production willing to take the opioid crisis somewhere strange rather than simply reproducing the facts of the epidemic. It has memorable music, striking imagery and a story that lands with increasing force.
For me, the question is ultimately about form. The subject deserves opera. The music is good enough for opera. But I wanted the production to trust the operatic form even more.
A compelling, beautifully designed and musically memorable new work — and an intriguing contribution to the continuing argument about what contemporary opera can be.
Kate Gaul, Theatre Now
