You run into the r-word (“relevant”) all the time in opera and theatre, says Constantine Costi.

“It gets tossed around like some smug hand grenade and it never goes off.”

Costi hopes his upcoming project as a director, Victorian Opera’s Melbourne, Cheremushki, will land in its audiences’ laps with the pin already out.

“This is about Melbourne, about Melbourne right now and about something so many people in the audience have faced: the torturous experience of being denied what is a basic human right – that of a home.”

Costi says that the basic ingredients of plot and character in Soviet-Russian composer Dmitri Shostakovich’s operetta Moscow, Cheryomushki – scheming landlords, money-hungry developers, hapless tenants – are as familiar to Australia’s 21st century Generation Rent as they were to the citizens of the USSR in the late 1950s, when Shostakovich composed what would be his only operetta.

Written with librettists Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky, two of the leading humourists of the time, and first performed in 1959, Moscow, Cheryomushki tells the story of a group of friends and acquaintances who have been granted new apartments in new apartment block. Over its three acts, each...