Winners of Adjudication

Best female voice - Lynlee Williams - Patience
Best supporting actress - Lynlee Williams - Patience
Best male voice - Ian Henderson - Patience
Overall winner - Dublin Mikado
1st Runner Up - East Anglia Princess Ida
2nd Runner Up - Victorian Opera Patience!

Pretty wonderful results!

Photographs

Back home, I have posted photos of Buxton, rehearsals, the cast and Haddon Hall at
http://labsoftware.com/buxton-patience/

Great trip.

Festival Ruddigore

Just back from the Festival production of Ruddigore, directed and conducted by Andrew Nicklin. This show is cast from submitted videos and produced by the festival itself, so we can assume it is not done on a shoestring. The published cast list did not show a Dick Dauntless, the lead tenor, but it developed here that they offered the young Brazilan member of Savoynet, Guillermo Gama the role.

Starting out, the orchestra sounded wonderful in this spectacular overture. The 9 young bridesmaids who began the show did not have enough sound to fill the hall, and it developed a bit later that ther were 7 more ladies in reserve who appeared as townspeople but were not in this first scene and added a lot of sound and support to the women. Apparently, according to the adjudicator, these 9 were all "graduates" of their (now defunct) Young Artistes program.

Dame Hannah was a good actress, describing her relationship with Sir Roderic quite wistfully but she was not commanding in the song "Sir Rupert Murgatroyd" and strayed from pitch a few times. Her warmth worked against her when chasing Robin with a poniard.

Rose was pretty and sang nicely but I found her dialog and lyrics hard to understand. Robin was OK but had no real strong characterization as a shy young man. I thought he was stiff, but his singing was OK.

Guillermo Gama as Dauntless has a nice young light tenor voice, but strained at the high notes and appeared to fake his B-flats which double with Rose. He was best in the small ensemble numbers and in the second act. He is as pleasant guy but needs to develop more presence and sound.

"My boy you may take it from me" was very hard to understand.

Elise's Mad Margaret could have been better. She is not a mezzo and notes below G were simply inaudible, including the opening notes and "Mad? I? Yes, very." She proved a stiff actress and her first act comedy as a mad woman did not work well. Her second act was much better. I complemented her later on being the only one of the Matter-patter trio I could actually understand. They took it at a rip-roaring pace for no good reason and the other two couldn't handle it.


I did not like their Despard at all. He was Estonian and apparently professional, but he crooned and slid through his songs and was in no way menacing or funny. His pitch was all over the place but he was very oily.

The chorus after the weak opening with the 9 girls was uniformly excellent. They looked and sounded great. The Spring/Winter chorale at the end of Act I was lovely, and here GG as Dauntless sounded great.

When the men entered as Bucks and Blades they were all wearing variations on some kind of military uniform, as Gilbert apparently had intended. However, each was in a different color scheme and it made for a rather garish effect.

When Sir Roderic appeared out of the picture frame in Act II, he was wearing a green vest with orange panels in it under his black suit, and when lit by an orange spot, he looked like a bumble-bee. When in more normal light, (he was never properly lit after that) he looked more like a leprechaun. However, his singing and acting were just fine if you didn't look too closely at the costume.

The Old Oak Tree duet was passing fine, but nothing special.

The did the Basingstoke finale including the 4/4 version of "Oh happy the lily."
They did not do "Away remorse" or "For 35 years" and did not add the extra ghost music.

The adjudicator loved everything, which made me wonder if she felt it impolitic make any criticisms of a festival-sponsored production. It was just an OK Ruddigore.

Of the 3 I saw, the South African Gondoliers was by far the best.

In the cabaret that followed, Elise sang her "Neath this lattice"
special (From Rose of Persia). She introduced it by noting that she had been singing mezzo all week and needed to assure herself she still had high notes. Then she said that no one should even try to sing along! Her high notes (I think this goes to around A above high C) are not well produced, just a parlor trick. She needs some serious coaching to improve her tone up there.

Home tomorrow. (Sitting in the Manchester airport now.)

Haddon Hall

Today 5 of us drove out to Haddon Hall, a Tudor-era castle started in the 12th century, and built over about 400 years. Because it was not occupied for some later years it was never "modernized" and looks much as it did then. Parts of Jany Eyre and The Princess Bride were filmed there.

We had lunch in Bakewell, home of the famous Bakewell tart. Delicious. Tonight is the Festival production of Ruddigore and home tomorrow.

It's over!

The G&S Opera Victoria production of Patience is over!
We played to a very enthusiastic and responsive full house (910). The Opera House is a magnificent place to work, with 8 dressing rooms, good flies, large orchestra pit and lots of amenities.
The show was really very good, and the adjudicator agreed. She praised all the things Robert Ray does well: the cast interacting and being involved the whole time, and praised the chorus and the smart-looking Dragoons as well as our spectacular Lady Jane (Lynlee Williams) who deserves an award for best voice for her performance of Silvered is the Raven Hair. The audience was thrilled.
She even praised the "guest artists" who "came and joined the company a few days ago and worked so hard to make it a success."
The only real negative was that she caught the fact that one or two times the chorus and orchestra were not quite together. It is very difficult to see the conductor if you are not in the front line on stage and this was probably inevitable.
Our show started with a curtain speech by "Richard D'Oyly Carte," welcoming the audience to the new Savoy theater with its all new electric lighting, and a brief demonstration of why it was perfectly safe. There was also an interpolated bit with 2 small children representing young Grosvenor and young Patience, while the real Patience sang "Long yeas ago." There was also some clowning near the end when Bunthorne and Grosvenor slipped into deep Australian accents.
I can't begin to tell you what a thrill it was to perform with a company this good and to be made to feel so welcome. They thanked me for coming, including the music director.

Today several of us are going to visit Haddon Hall.

This is the day

We rehearsed all day Monday some of the time in costume.
It is looking pretty good.
We are doing the set "bump-in" at 9am this morning and start rehearsing at 11.
Tonight is it!



Saw the Nene Opera's Yeomen last night. It was good in many ways, but I would describe the whole effort as mezzo-forte at best. They never actually hit a fortissimo until "Leonard Meryll, Leonard Meryll!" in the Act I Finale.
Carruthers was weak and not menacing in When our Gallant Norman Foes. All of the men's wigs were so bushy that they looked like a medieval bad hair day. Meryll was great as was Point. Wilfred was outstanding, played rather in the style of a Welsh coal-miner. He was also the director and blew everyone off the stage whenever he was there. Not a good idea. Elsie was a bit thin in Act I, and Phoebe a bit lifeless (not flirtatious). Everyone was better in Act II. Fairfax had a youthful tenor voice, not all that big, and looked like he was about 12. Needed to seem older and have more gravitas. He was actually covered by Elsie in "With happiness our soul is cloyed" in the finale.
The Act I finale was utterly static. Everyone just stood and sang. They cut "Rapture, rapture."
The adjudicator was quite critical of the staticness and of the fact that the director didn't bring others up to his level. She agreed with most of my other sentiments but liked Fairfax better than I did.

Monday morning

My wireless connection vanished Saturday night and I just got back connected this morning.
We have been running bits of the show and ran all of Act I more or less in sequence with stops because some of it had not yet been staged with this particular group of people (like me).
Ran and staged the end of Act II and then went back to do the rest because the men aren't in all of that. I keep wondering if I can remember all of this precision marching, where a mistake would be so obvious, but the rest of the cast is very supportive of my trying to get this right knowing how hard it is on short notice.


We saw the Capetown South Africa production of Gondoliers last night. Many of us went because we had two of our cast members also in that show. The costumes and dancing were wonderful and the chorus sound was lovely, especially the men in With Happiness the Very Pith. The leads were mixed. I loved Luiz and Guiseppe the most. Gianetta and Cassilda were good altho Cassilda was using a darker sound I didn't like. Marco had a bit of a thin reedy sound but got through TAPOSE creditably. I did not like the Duchess, she was not overbearing enough.

They started with a pantomime during the overture (with flash card titles) that showed how a baby was stolen or swithced or something. Very cute. Then Inez lurked in nearly every scene throughout the show, which I rather liked. When Don Alhambra sent hsi men to fetch her they were Mafiosi in black pin striped suits carrying violin cases. They also ended the 1st act with them wrestling Inez, which I didn't think was very funny. The second act costumes were simply astonishing!

They made some unusual cuts, notably half of Tessa's "now Marco dear," the birthday dialog with Don Alhambra, Tessa's "Farewell my own" . I also missed "O Mt Vesuvius, here we are in arithmetic, " and "he couldn't have been a Plaza-Toro! Oh, couldn't he!"
But this is such a long show, I think these cuts were judicious.

During Don Alhambra's long song about "all possible doubt," the two couples are served spaghetti and blow it out on some surprising point or other.

I did also note that there was only one black player in the whole cast.



Today we have a full costumed run-through.