Scottish Opera has revived The Seven Deadly Sins, its sassy co-production with Company Chordelia, at this year's Edinburgh Festival Fringe.

This ballet chanté depicts a young woman making her way in Depression Era America as imagined by Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht. Anna leaves her home in Louisiana and earns money to send her family to build a house. But life in the big cities is tough and full of challenges to her virtue.

The two sides of her personality, Anna I and Anna II, struggle between making money and doing the decent thing. In each city, Anna II ends up committing a sin. Lust consists in Anna II wanting to marry the man she loves, Pride in not wanting to work in a strip-club.

Soprano Nadine Livingston as Anna I is director of Anna the Movie while Kirsty Pollock dances Anna II, who gets the fun but also the heartache. Peter Baldwin elegantly dances Anna II's lover and other male parts in the big cities. Kally Lloyd-Jones, directing as well as choreographing, has created some highly-charged and sensuous movement.

Janis Hart divides the stage with a gold lamé bed for the big cities and a timber frame for the Louisiana house, separated by a frame set with bulbs like a dressing-room mirror. Through the frame, the family back home can become the audience in the strip club. Curtains, money, a bunch of flowers are passed through the frame to furnish the house, culminating in a delicious mime of polishing the windows.

The family back home comprise Barnaby Rea as a bearded Mother, Ronan Busfield as Father, and Brothers Damian Thantrey and Peter Van Hulle. Their ensemble is effective, frequently providing a Greek chorus-like commentary on the action on the other half of the stage.

In a recent article in the Guardian Review, Con Ellison asks what makes a great opera libretto, and answers by saying all of them have major literary figures as librettists. In the twentieth century, they don't come much greater than Bertolt Brecht and W H Auden, respectively librettist and co-translator of The Seven Deadly Sins. Furthermore, with Brecht writing, the words are inherently political and it matters that they are heard.

Too often, however, the balance between orchestra-pit and stage does not favour the singers. Although the orchestra makes a great sound, conductor Jessica Cottis has, perhaps, not made enough allowance for the acoustic of the space in Patersons Land. It's a pity, as it mars an otherwise satisfying production.