"I do hope you will forgive me for any light-heartedness or ebullience," he writes in his programme notes (yes, there are programme notes). And, never one to miss a trick, he's picked the right spot for a gig in honour of, well, his unsung self: St Luke's Church. Bands often wheel on the strings to cover for something that's fundamentally lacking, but the Norma Desmond nightmares of Haines's songs cry out for them. The fact that he asked for people to stop buying records just as his solo album was released suggested how wilfully the old ham embraced his embittered-outsider position. It's no surprise, then, that his latest album, Das Capital, sees him lavishing opulent strings on re-recordings of some of his old numbers, in celebration of his "songwriting genius".

The Auteurs split in 1996 (reforming, briefly, for an album in 1999), and Haines went on to make grand statements out of grubbily bilious sentiments in two bands whose names had his stench about them - Baader Meinhof and Black Box Recorder - as well as in solo projects and a call for a national pop strike. Close your eyes and his snakish, breathy voice evokes images of cobwebbed ballrooms, or a cross between Richard O'Brien's Riff Raff in Rocky Horror and Joel Grey's impish MC in Cabaret. Many of the Auteurs' early songs exuded a sense of glamour soured, cutting through Britpop's perky glory. And since "Starstruck", the tale of a career in permanent eclipse, a flair for drama of a tirelessly rancorous kind has fuelled him. "I was in vaudeville at age five," Luke Haines and his old band, the Auteurs, sang in 1993. To 30 August (01273 813813); Proms performance tonight at the Royal Albert Hall, London SW7 (020-7589 8212).

But a successful Fledermaus never keeps us waiting.As for that cripplingly slow and ill-advised lecture on the king of wines, someone other than Frosch should have kept a clear head. They're generally worth waiting for - Lyubov Petrova's stage-struck Adele kittenishly vamping her way through the laughing song, or the vocally sensational Pamela Armstrong's Rosalinde in her show-stopping Czardas. Get the picture?But too much of a good thing, as Rosalinde discovers, can be costly, and the problem with this magnum - no, jeroboam - of an evening is that it consistently tries too hard with the spoken text. The discrepancy in energy levels between speech and song is too great. There's a lot of talent on stage but we seem to spend an awful lot of time gazing at the hypnotic revolve of Benoit Dugardyn's ingenious art deco set in anticipation of the next musical highlight. "Don't think you can compromise me with your giant Bosendonker!" exclaims Rosalinde in breathy anticipation. Meanwhile Alfred (Par Lindskog) doesn't go anywhere without his grand piano.

Her husband Eisenstein (Sir Thomas Allen) is, of course, a baritone who's exasperation is measured in lines like "I didn't get anywhere with her [Rosalinde] until I lowered the pitch of her piano." Or "what's wrong with a baritone with a notable extension?". In adapting and updating the text, director Stephen Lawless and his collaborator Daniel Dooner have rightly homed in on the sexual innuendo.Much is made of our heroine Rosalinde's obsession with tenors - and in particular her one-time lover Alfred's high notes. But the pace, rather like the beverage, can go flat in an instant.One of the great problems - and challenges - with operetta is getting the balance and the dynamic right between the dialogue and musical numbers. He and the orchestra give this favourite old pop classic some serious attention. The pace is racy, the articulation brilliant, the Viennesisms deftly in place, the waltz fruity and uplifting It's a cracking start. First rule of operetta: don't underestimate it; it doesn't play itself Jurowski knows that. But how are we going to feel the next morning? Content or just appallingly hung over?A bit of both.