Entrepreneur and impresario Raymond Gubbay supposedly has the luvvies choking on their Sancerre. The best seats in his new Savoy Opera cost fifty pounds while similar seats at the Royal Opera cost four times more (there, a ticket in the stalls costs 150 pounds to you and 50 more in taxpayer subsidies). Charging just a quarter of the full Covent Garden cost, Mr Gubbay pays his cast and orchestra, pays theatre rent to the Savoy, and all his other costs, and still makes a little something for his considerable risk and effort. Luvvies are upset because he shatters their old lie that opera cannot survive without taxpayer subsidy.

And what's it like? Accessible (it's in English) and terrific entertainment. In his ongoing Barber of Seville at least two voices are of very high quality and the rest are plenty good enough. And director Aletta Collins has done an international caliber job staging Rossini's potentially complex tale, enhanced by brilliant comic turns that you'd never see in stuffy old Covent Garden. The couple next to me nearly needed oxygen.

It really is The People's Opera. If you think that opera is all egghead music sung by fat ladies in tin brassieres, Mr Gubbay's production shows why it is so madly popular in so many countries among people of all varieties. It doesn't draw blood from taxpayers, and it won't bust your bank account to give it a try.