From the moment Santa Fe Opera announced its 2011 lineup more than a year ago, one wondered if The Last Savage, a featherweight comic opera by Gian Carlo Menotti, just might be the sleeper hit of the season — and, by golly, it turned out to be precisely that.

Preposterous even by the standards of staged farce, it has no moral message to convey apart from the suggestion that true love may win out in the end. The Last Savage makes its audience always smile and often laugh, and nobody in the house needs to worry that they're being made a better person for it all.

The first shout-out goes to the Santa Fe Opera's general director, Charles MacKay, who simply would not accept that this piece deserved the scorn that greeted its first performances, at the Paris Opéra Comique in October 1963 and at the Metropolitan Opera three months later. Apparently, it was the wrong opera at the wrong place at the wrong time, maybe with the wrong singers and directors, wrong enough to consign the work to oblivion.

Still, the very few revivals given since then convinced MacKay that it could succeed.

He found in Ned Canty a director who could be trusted to mount a creative, committed and sympathetic production. Risk was involved in producing an unknown work with no "built-in box office," but operagoers this summer are going to reap the rewards.

So here we are in India in the 1960s, in the magnificent palace of the Maharajah of Rajaputana — we see it stretching for blocks through a window — where the Maharajah and an American tycoon are trying to arrange the marriage of their son and daughter (respectively), each hoping to benefit from the economic prospects of the other.

The kids are ill matched, with the daughter, Kitty, being intent on staking her bona fides as an anthropologist by discovering a truly uncivilized man. (How hard can that be?) The fathers try to assuage Kitty's academic yearnings by hiring a well-built local lad, Abdul, to hide in the jungle pretending to be a savage. Kitty finds him and takes him back to Chicago, where she introduces him to her social group, a pretentious horde conversant with the latest art, music, poetry and philosophy. Abdul finds them so appalling that he flees back to India, still pursued by Kitty, who (of course) has fallen in love with him.

In the end, mismatched couples are reassembled in the way they ought to be, and nobody's the worse for wear.

The opera opens with a rollicking prelude in the spirit of Wolf-Ferrari's Secret of Susanna Overture, though with touches of snake-charmer orientalism added.

Menotti sticks to an ultra-conservative musical language here, but one also notes references to such later operas as The Rake's Progress by Stravinsky, who lashed out fiercely against Menotti in retribution.

The first action we see involves a swarm of swamis, clad in loincloths, turbans and tattooed body stockings, prancing in outlandish choreography devised by Seán Curran. At this opening, viewers may gasp with trepidation akin to that of the theatergoers in Mel Brooks' film The Producers, a near contemporary to this opera. By the time the swamis return disguised as shrubbery, viewers will have surrendered to the sit-com spirit.

This is not an opera for the politically correct, but at least it is an equal-opportunity opera to the extent that every national reference is equally cartoonish and none seems bent on bigoted ill will.

The production flows swift and clear through its three-hour running time. The well-matched cast includes opportunities for many of the company's apprentice singers, especially in the Chicago penthouse party scene. The principals do get individual arias and duets (a couple of them rather sappy), but none is especially memorable in what ultimately seems a precisely interlocked ensemble opera.

Soprano Anna Christy, in her haute-couture pink safari outfit and pith helmet, attacks her high-flying part with crystalline precision, her music sometimes spoofing Lakmé's "Bell Song" by way of Bernstein's Candide.

Bass Kevin Burdette plays her accommodating father with wealthy indifference (in the movie version, they'd be Drew Barrymore and John Waters); baritone Daniel Okulitch proves a noble and patient savage, his Abdul being the only blameless character; soprano Jennifer Zetlan is both scheming and affecting, providing some wonderful singing in an Act Three aria that parodies Donizetti-style bel canto; and tenor Sean Panikkar is stalwart and stubborn as the Indian scion who just isn't attracted to Western women.

All of these infused their singing with debonair lightness that wouldn't be out of place on Broadway.

Bass Thomas Hammons was a Maharajah bedecked with outstanding facial hair, and mezzo-soprano Jamie Barton was a Maharanee of inestimable girth — important for the plot — who keeps one eye on her stock ticker: a dysfunctional but oddly lovable couple, except maybe to their son. Canty directed all of these worthy singers to play their outrageous parts as if they believed themselves to be normal, even when delivering lamentable couplets like "He cleans his teeth just as he's supposed to/And he is learning to blow his nose, too." This cast the absurdity of the situations into high relief, and it prevented the sort of histrionic overkill that could have proved fatal.

Menotti was a deft orchestrator, and conductor George Manahan and his players in the pit made the most of this breezy, well-wrought score.

Allen Moyer's detailed sets and costumes deserve an entire admiring review unto themselves; their profusion of shocking pinks and gaudy chartreuses were everywhere enhanced by Rick Fisher's attentive lighting.

All is of a piece in this production, which should at least amuse you and will assuredly send some viewers rolling in the aisles.

IF YOU GO

• The Last Savage, with music and libretto by Gian Carlo Menotti (assisted in the English version by George Mead) continues Wednesday and Aug. 5, 11, 18 and 25. For tickets, call 505-986-5900 or 800-280-4654, quickly.