You’ll find better fake snow in a provincial Nutcracker, more authentic log cabins in Dr Quinn, Medicine Woman and a more hair-raising gunfight in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles. And yet to those who would put Piero Faggioni’s 1977 production of Puccini’s Girl of the Golden West on the scrapheap I blow a hearty raspberry.

If Faggioni, back again for this eighth revival of his monumental production – giant sets by the Bond film veteran Ken Adam, hence the two hefty intervals – isn’t fussed by plausibility, he cares so deeply for two of Puccini’s most intriguing lovers, the virginal barmaid Minnie (Eva-Maria Westbroek) and the swarthy conman, Dick Johnson (José Cura), that I’ll forgive him nearly everything.

For whether there’s “whiskey per tutti” in the Polka Inn or not, these two are in the last chance saloon. She’s the innocent who talks tough but can’t wait to melt in Johnson’s arms; he’s the bad boy looking for one shining spirit to save him. Faggioni knows that, too, and it’s the arc he follows, even as we dodge past the clutter (metronomic window-flapping, Minnie’s smalls hanging on the washing line) on the way to the redemptive finale.

Four years ago Covent Garden refurbished this staging with some dodgy casting and slightly overegged conducting from Antonio Pappano. Now both have been rectified. Pappano whisks Puccini’s ardour into something both deeply passionate and remarkably modern: I heard Ravel, Strauss and even Stravinsky in the punchy playing of the orchestra (the men’s chorus are powerful, too). Cura, also back from 2004, still has an annoying propensity to fake any soft, high notes, but otherwise sings with muscular energy, and he’s the macho bandit to the hilt.

Can you have a triumph of bad singing? If so, step up Silvano Carroli, whose Jack Rance, the renegade Sheriff with lurid designs on Minnie, is a weird treat. Carroli, unbelievably, sang in this production when it was new and now, looking and sounding as though he’s been preserved in the whiskey barrel ever since, snarls around the stage to strangely potent effect. For classier singing go elsewhere (Vuyani Mlinde’s Jake Wallace, for example), but this is an old pro enjoying a last fling.

As for our Minnie, what Westbroek brings to the role isn’t just clarion high notes and lyrical fervour. It’s more that this “fanciulla” is really a girl, and not a rasping gal. From the moment Johnson walks in she’s out of her depth: yes, the pistol is brandished, but it quivers with uncertainty. She’s gentle, really, and a little bit damaged: thank goodness, then, that this is one opera where the heroine gets her happy ending.

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