Yes, it was bound to be HMS Laugh-a-minute, given Cal “One Man, Two Guvnors” McCrystal’s ENO comedy riffs on an already funny early G&S classic, but what does this tight little craft have to say to Little England today?

A revival of a multi-award winning musical, with a big star or two, may look like a safe choice to re-open London’s largest theatre, the Coliseum, but there was a tingle of jeopardy in the air, exemplified when the show catches you by surprise, the curtain rising when (surely) people remain in the bar?

Well, it wasn’t quite Messiah, but it was a source of joy. In ENO’s end-of-lockdown staging, BBC Two’s transmission of Handel’s resurrection song delivered a scant 54 minutes of music from the Coliseum on Easter Saturday. In contrast, two ancient Poirot movies, staples of Bank Holiday line-ups roughly since the Pleistocene Era, had hogged fully four hours of the channel’s afternoon schedule.

It must have felt very strange to Mark Wigglesworth that he returned to the London Coliseum under such unanticipated circumstances.

So Susanna and Figaro got married on Saturday, just before the entire Almaviva household and its home, the London Coliseum, went into quarantine.

Those who booed the production team last night - there was nothing but generous cheering for singers, conductor and orchestra - might reflect that this was at least regietheater, that singular brand of not-all-bad director's opera in Germany, with discipline and purpose close enough to its subject. There were some cliches and the occasional question-mark - who's the trembling, plastic-wrapped youth in underpants and why the nearby oil drum?

Just when you thought Christmas was well and truly over, along comes another box of delights. And there isn’t a disappointment in it. If it were nuts, there’d be nothing but cashews; if chocolates, there wouldn’t be a single disgusting lime-cream. It would be all Ferrero Rochers, gift-wrapped. English National Ballet’s 70th birthday party opened and closed with class, in every sense.

It’s unlikely that Lord Byron would recognise much about Le Corsaire. Beyond the characters’ names and the Ottoman location, there is little trace of the 1814 bestselling verse-novel on whose fame the ballet hitched a ride. Its plot is very silly indeed – a tale of abducted slave girls and piratical derring-do with added 19th-century ballet tropes of poisoned flowers and opium-induced dreams, not to mention a shipwreck in the final three minutes.

A pas de deux is normally an opportunity for two dancers to express the pinnacle of their skill and the choreographer's art. In the case of McGregor + Mugler, the duet receiving its world premiere as part of a Russian-sponsored triple bill, it became an opportunity for a big-name designer to strut his stuff.

What price a pair of seats at the ballet? If you’re talking the latest starry Russian import then, with a few perks thrown in, you might not see much change from £800. And yet the size of the first-night crowd queuing for Modanse, a double bill starring the Bolshoi prima Svetlana Zakharova and a bunch of her pals, apparently required the erection of crush barriers along St Martin’s Lane.