MUNICH — Having established my citizenship as Canadian, the middle-aged woman sitting next to me in the National Theatre wondered, after two acts, what I thought of this production of Falstaff.

Strongly cast, I began, uttering something of a truism where presentations by the Bavarian State Opera — the largest company in Germany — are concerned. It was odd, however, to see the title character and the burghers who plot his downfall dressed in a combination of contemporary street clothes and tartan finery.

“But they are Scottish nobles!� the woman retorted.

As I struggled to find a courteous means of saying they were no such thing — Verdi’s valedictory opera is based on that redoubtably English Shakespearean romp, The Merry Wives of Windsor — it dawned on me that this was an instance of the Not So Bad syndrome.

Kilts and tartans? Not So Bad. At least the action was situated in the British Isles, and not Iraq, or a Nevada brothel, or on Mars. At least the comic spirit of the piece was respected in this venerable production by Eike Gramss and not defiled by an orgy or crushed by a political screed. Ambrogio Maestri, a huge man who needed no stuffing, was wonderful in the title role.

“You should have seen the Troubadour last night,� my neighbour continued. “The production has nothing to do with the story.�

I did see the spanking-new Il Trovatore, two days later, on Monday, and it was indeed a pretentious piece of work. The show opens with a buck-naked blond of a certain age at centre stage, representing the mother of Azucena, who is part of the backstory but not a singing character in Verdi’s opera.

The guards to whom Ferrando (Kwangchul Youn, taking charge) recounts the tale are not 15th-century soldiers but dark-suited businessmen, one of whom supports a mannequin of uncertain sex on his knee. As for the famous Gypsy Chorus of Act 2, it is undertaken by a corps of rail workers who watch a stripper do her thing around a locomotive. If the wheels, pulleys and harsh lights of capitalism were not staging clichés before the opening of the 2013 Munich Opera Festival, they must be now.

The turntable on which many productions spin in the National Theatre was put to full use at the start of Act 3, as the French director Olivier Py mounted a Disneyesque mini-festival of stage excess. A woman (flanked by modern white-coated doctors) giving birth and two hydrocephalic babies were perhaps the most memorable images. Noteworthy also was a guest appearance by the Ku Klux Klan.

Not all of this was, as my Falstaff neighbour contended, unrelated to the story. Many of the didactic dumb shows endeavoured, however uselessly, to illustrate the libretto. So with a powerful central quartet (Anja Harteros as Leonora, Elena Manistina as Azucena, Jonas Kaufmann as Manrico and Alexey Markov as the Conte di Luna) and spirited (if occasionally overstretched) conducting by Paolo Carignani, this night out proved strangely hard to hate.

Nor could the German director Peter Konwitschny completely quench the flame of Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde in a production dating from 1998. Fear not: The entry of Wagner’s hero with half a face of shaving cream remains one of the premier head-shaking moments in annals of contemporary European opera production.