The last few years at the English National Opera have been dogged by uncertainty and upheaval, and show few signs of abating: the company’s producing director gave notice the week before this opening. It may not be surprising, then, that the now-annual “let’s try and get bums on seats with something other than opera” season at its Coliseum base seems to be growing both more strident and longer, stretching this year beyond spring and through most of the summer.

It got off to a poor start with a perhaps understandably rare revival of the Andersson/Ulvaeus/Rice musical Chess in May. Now, however, the ENO seems to have hit on an almost perfect synthesis: a fully staged production of a classic musical whose talent blends the worlds of opera and music-theatre and whose staging is both slick and smart. If only it were a show of their own, but in fact it’s a revival by Opera North of their 2015 hit (co-produced with Welsh National Opera) Kiss Me, Kate, now coming into London at the end of a national tour.

All the elements so lauded three years ago seem still to be present and correct. Quirijn de Lang and Stephanie Corley each combine operatic power and precision with a playful exuberance as they take the leads in the multi-level plot, about both backstage and onstage ruckuses (rucki?) in a touring production of a musical based on The Taming Of The Shrew: Fred and Lilli’s bust-ups leak into their performances as Petruchio and Kate. This double-decker approach also allowed scriptwriters Bella and Sam Spewack to finesse away or subvert most of the awkward misogyny which makes Shrew such a hard sell these days.

I have to confess that this has not been one of my favourite Golden Age musicals. True, it contains a clutch of standards such as “Another Op’nin’, Another Show” and “Too Darn Hot” and some of Cole Porter’s most coleporterish lyrics, but there’s also filler in there, even when it’s dressed up as the very opposite: the second half is thin on actual plot and seems almost to be a mere succession of showstoppers – “Always True To You In My Fashion” with two encores, followed by some tap razzmatazz in “Bianca”, followed by “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” again with a brace of rehearsed reprises.

Nevertheless, Jo Davies’ staging (overseen in revival by Ed Goggin) and Will Tuckett’s choreography (via David James Hulston) keep matters fizzing, and James Holmes and his 50-plus phalanx of musicians make us realise how much we’re missing in this age of pre-programmed synthetic pseudo-orchestras. I may not yet be entirely persuaded to elevate the work into my personal pantheon, but on this showing it’s much more enjoyable than a brush up your Shakespeare.

Written for the Financial Times.