The Royal Opera has been troubled by high-profile cancellations of late. First there was Bryn Terfel's withdrawal from Wagner's Ring. Now the company's new staging of Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore comes minus the cult-ish tenor Rolando Villazón, who has cancelled all his engagements until the new year. Covent Garden has elected to replace him as Nemorino with the comparatively unknown Stefano Secco who, on this showing, is something of a find.

There is a reediness in Secco's sound, for which he compensates with phrasing of great subtlety. A tremendous actor, he follows Aleksandra Kurzak's feisty, manipulative Adina with puppy-dog eyes, and is touchingly desperate when he allows himself to be sold into the army for cash. And his Una Furtiva Lagrima is exquisite, making us realise that this is a man who has the sensibility of a poet in the body of a nerd.

What surrounds him, however, is hit and miss. Mikko Franck's conducting is by turns fiery and sensitive, but Laurent Pelly's production is so relentlessly busy that at times we are distracted from the music. Astute when it comes to depicting the dynamics of a gossip-ridden rural community, Pelly is less assured when it comes to the opera's darker undertow.

Dulcamara (Paolo Gavanelli) is robbed of his usual roguish wit and turned into a real slimeball, while Ludovic Tézier's unimaginatively sung Belcore is a charmless bully. Both are presented as cynical opportunists, though Pelly also under-emphasises the the opera's crucial point - that the real elixir of love is money and that this is a society that deems people sexy if they have it, but scorns them when they do not.

· Until November 29. Box office: 020-7304 4000.