By making John F Kennedy's Camelot the setting for Welsh National Opera's new staging of Rigoletto, director James Macdonald invites comparison with Jonathan Miller's 1982 version set in 1950s Mafia New York and with David McVicar's recent no-holds-barred Covent Garden production. The details of the former US president's life certainly read like an opera plot: glamorous high society, a curse on the family, young women meeting untimely deaths. But it is the president as the philandering duke that gives this Rigoletto its dramatic legitimacy.

The Capitol dome loomed large in Robert Innes Hopkins's design, and the opening sequence was driven along by conductor Patrick Summers: an elegant penthouse Halloween party, where senator playboys and tipsy ladies twist and conga, witty masks disguising faces but not the lust or the sexual pull of power.

Here Rigoletto, marked by a crippled leg rather than deformed back, was an incongruous figure - can a jester have true moral fibre when his boss the duke/president's idea of entertainment is serial sex?

Macdonald makes Gilda, Rigoletto's daughter, more repressed and immature than usual. Uncomfortable with her burgeoning sexuality, fixated rather than in love, her emotional development always lagged behind what is mapped out in Verdi's music. This was the most problematic aspect of an otherwise viable staging, making things hard on the soprano Celena Shafer, only truly credible as she lay dying in her father's arms.

Voices were characterised by strength and flexibility rather than outstanding beauty, although baritone Chen-Ye Yuan did give the jester a dark, manic intensity.

In rep until May 23 (box office: 029 2087 8889), then touring.