There’s a rich tradition of French operettas set Les Halles, the Parisian central market that received a grand iron and glass makeover in the 1850s as part of the Second Empire building boom. Offenbach’s deliciously daffy Mesdames de la Halle opened at the Théâtre des Bouffes Parisiens in 1858, with Charles Lecoq’s La Fille de Madame Angot, a tuneful hit about the daughter of a notorious market woman, transferring from Brussels to Paris in 1873. 

Reynaldo Hahn’s Ciboulette, which premiered at the Théâtre des Variétés in Paris, may feel almost contemporaneous, but in fact opened on 7 April 1923. An immediate smash, it was perhaps the last great French operetta before the genre lost out to the rising popularity of the American musical. 

The title character’s name means ‘chive’ and coincidentally is shared by the heroine of Offenbach’s Mesdames de la Halle. A pretty, 21-year-old market gardener, she is told by a fortune teller that she will find true love not in the arms of the eight bumpkins to whom she...