Mischa Spoliansky's operetta Send for Mr Plim caused something of a stir last year when a version of it - reorchestrated and with some additions - opened at London's BAC. The Covent Garden festival has now put on a new production, albeit in English (a very funny translation by Kenneth Richardson), though reverting to Spolian sky's original score. It proves a disturbing piece, for beneath its surface froth lurks chilling irony. Spoliansky, one of the greats of Weimar Republic cabaret (he put Marlene Dietrich on the map long before she was discovered by Josef von Sternberg), wrote it in 1932. It has been interpreted as anti-capitalist satire, which is only partly true, for its real subject - to which history has given a horrid resonance - is a vision of a society seeking a scapegoat for its every failing. The setting is a Berlin department store where the impoverished Plim is hired so that the management can make a show of firing him whenever one of the customers (a line-up of ghastly plutocrats) lodges a complaint. The Chaplinesque Plim screws up and is eventually sacked in earnest before the management realise that he is indispensable.

"Shopworkers can't sing of great emotion, not like at the opera," Plim comments - but Spoliansky uses the material to spoof almost every operatic convention going. The store's managers connive in Rossinian patter, Caroline von Recklitz, "president of the Women's Institute of Spandau" extols the beauty of an out-of-stock chamber pot with Wagenerian heft. Elida de Coty, a stroppy international vamp, is the coloratura soprano to end coloratura sopranos. It is a delicious score and the Covent Garden festival did it proud with a witty staging by Paul Curran that allowed a number of well-known British singers to send themselves up rotten. Harry Nicoll was a wonderfully nerdy Plim. Frances McCafferty brought the house down as Caroline. Best of the lot was Lilian Watson's Elida, camping it up in a mink coat and spangles and flinging out top Es as if it were the easiest thing in the world.

Coupling it with Weill's The Seven Deadly Sins seemed like a good idea, but here things were not so hot. Curran's staging lacked focus. The dancers, Maxine Fone and Andrew George, using their own choreography, indulged in a lot of sub-Kenneth Macmillan erotic grappling when it was not always needed. The BBC Concert Orchestra under Robert Ziegler played it to perfection, but Marie McLaughlin, got up like Joan Crawford, came unstuck in places as Anna, unaccountably so, since she has sung the role in London before and been, in the past, one of its finest interpreters.