“The Inspector,” produced by the Wolf Trap Foundation for the Performing Arts, is loosely based on Nicolai Gogol’s “The Government Inspector,” a 19th-century play in which a town mired in dishonesty prepares for the visit of a government official charged with getting rid of corruption. A mayor-on-the-take and his cronies hasten to make their town look honest. “The Inspector” is not an update of the original, but a wholly new concept. A collaboration of the dynamic duo composer John Musto and librettist Mark Campbell, it is witty and sophisticated with a satirical bite. Its action has been moved from tsarist Russia to Sicily, between 1925 to 1930, a period when Mussolini sent government representatives out to clean up the countryside.

In “The Inspector,” the mayor of Santa Schifezza, Fazzobaldi (Robert Orth), has heard that Mussolini is sending an inspector to his town. Fazzobaldi is terrified that he will find out about the graft and bribery that have gone unchecked for years. The joke of the opera is that when a man named Tancredi (Vale Rideout) and his servant Cosimo (William Sharp) arrive on the scene, the mayor and all his Cabinet ministers believe that Tancredi is the inspector. Fazzobaldi wines and dines the men at his villa.