The current West End G&S season for the Carl Rosa Opera may have been booked as a five-week filler at the Gielgud, wedged in between the end of the Chichester transfer of Nicholas Nickleby and the arrival next month of Yasmina Reza’s new play God of Carnage, but going to see the matinee of The Pirates of Penzance yesterday I was amazed to see a returns queue stretching down the side of the theatre. There clearly is an audience for this kind of thing – even if it was the kind who, as I overheard the man behind me saying, want things the determinedly old-fashioned way, “not murdered as they do at the Coliseum”; while another person, just down the row from me, was actually following the libretto from as CD booklet in his lap, and seemed to have his eyes there far more than on the stage.
The latter may, in fact, not have been an altogether bad choice: if you wanted to see cardboard sets and wooden performances, this was clearly the place to be.
But W.S. Gilbert’s still-sparkling lyrics were carefully articulated, with not a microphone in sight – at least until the arrival of Jo Brand’s novelty turn as the Sergeant of Police, who did have one, and rather scarily brought the Victorian values of this production even closer to home, since she resembled nothing so much as a funereal Queen Victoria, who subsequently morphs into a white blancmange.
But the sell-out success of this show is another triumph for the champion of the unsubsidised, producer Raymond Gubbay who brings the classics to the masses (or should that be the masses to the classics?) with his arena operas (next week, his David Freeman directed production of Tosca returns to the Royal Albert Hall), classical spectaculars (complete, as the ad says, with “music, lights, lasers, fireworks, spectacle”) and popular classical galas. The Carl Rosa Company, celebrating the 10th anniversary of being re-formed, not only revives a traditional way of doing things, but it also revives a once-celebrated but long-forgotten name: as Gubbay writes in a programme note, “Not many people will nowadays remember the original Carl Rosa Opera Company, formed towards the end of the 19th century and touring until 1957. It was only the Arts Council’s unwillingness to continue funding it that brought about its closure; now where, I wonder, have we heard that before? Until then, the Carl Rosa Opera Company toured the length and breadth of the UK taking their productions to theatres which might otherwise have been starved of opera.”
Gubbay has duly added this re-formed company to his portfolio, and his unfailing commercial instincts have obviously paid off once again. The sell-out audience were clearly willing to provide their own subsidy, in ticket prices up to £49.50, to see them.
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