“The sun’s a thief and with his great attraction / Robs the vast sea. The moon’s an arrant thief, / And her pale fire she snatches from the sun. / The sea’s a thief …” and so on. This locus classicus for the conceit of theft as the driving force of the universe comes from Shakespeare’s Timon of Athens, the little-loved tragedy the critic Harold Bloom called the “stillborn twin” of King Lear. For a more cheerful, even ebullient, treatment of the theme, check out Jacques Offenbach’s Les Brigands, an infectiously melodious farce of heists, cross-border grifts, and identities stolen as well as mistaken to which no synopsis can begin to do justice. The wildly inventive, ever-more-fashionable Australian director Barrie Kosky seems just the man to unleash on this froufrou from a Deuxième Empire on the eve of the ruinous Franco-Prussian War. “In the troubled world that we live,” Kosky says in a video promo for the show, “Offenbach is an antidote. For a few hours, to have joy and laughter is as important as to have existential thoughts and to cry. Sometimes we forget that humor and laughing are, like oxygen, essential to the human condition.” Amen. —Matthew Gurewitsch