Revenge is best served weird

Wigs are big in a zany new show opening at Greenwich Theatre tonight about Scarlatti, a composer dominated by his father and overshadowed by contemporaries Bach and Handel.

The underdog finally has his day in Scarlatti's Revenge, a kind of classical music pantomime devised by the Natural Theatre Company which supplies all street performers for the nearby Dome and adjacent Skyscape.

Some of them, those alien tourists known as coneheads, even turn up in the show. "We do go into the future," explains Ralph Oswick, company founder and wearer of one of the more conservative hairdos as Scarlatti.

"Our scene is set at a spurious Millennium event - the Millennium Music Extravaganza - where it is revealed that Scarlatti has become the composer of the Millennium.

"Born in the same year as Bach and Handel, he was more famous than them in his time, and is a genius if limited to one instrument, the harpsichord." No such instrumental restrictions are observed by the show. "Some of the music is a bit disguised," admits Oswick. "Our interval music is Scarlatti transposed for brass band. We also use his Sonata No 64 but played rather like a Jacques Loussier number with cello and set to words."

The show, the company's third about the composer, has not been seen here before but has already been successfully staged at the first Berlin Scarlatti Festival.

The "Naturals" are a cult in Germany where they have just finished a tour playing to packed audiences whom they persuade to wave Union Jacks at the close of every show.

With the company turning over around £3 million a year, Oswick has one overriding aim. "We want to be as silly and as funny as when we were hippies," he says.