Primi Divi

Carl Rosa Company at the Gielgud Theatre

22nd February 2008

Okay so I didn’t really want to go to this. The only thing I really like about G&S is Sarah Tynan as a schoolgirl in The Mikado and that’s not really anything to do with the music. But it was on and I didn’t have anything else planned so I thought you know, why not?

The Carl Rosa Company isn’t the same as the original Carl Rosa Company but they do the same stuff. They did 3 operettas, The Mikado, Iolanthe and Pirates of Penzance but we only saw the last one. The singers varied a lot, most of them are people who mostly do stuff like G&S but Andrew Rees who was in The Mikado is a real proper opera singer who’s sung stuff like Aida and Traviata at the ENO and Sophie-Louise Dann has been in proper musical stuff like 42nd Street and Cabaret and Shakespeare plays too. Then there was Jo Brand who isn’t any kind of professional singer or actress but I’ll get to her later.

The standard varied too. David Curry who I’ve never heard of sang the role of Frederic and he sounded like a proper opera singer, I can imagine him doing Mozart and Handel but he’s just right for G&S roles because he could sing almost without vibrato. Then he put a bit on in the section where it sounded like they were taking off Mozart. Steven Page who sang the Pirate King was really good as well, he didn’t sound like an opera singer even though he is but you could tell he was really good. He’s a great actor too, really funny. His character was a bit of a prat but you could tell he was a prat pretending to be really hard and that’s not easy to act. Michael Kerry who sang his Lieutenant did that really well too.

Barry Clark was good as Major-General Stanley, his singing wasn’t always in tune but he was really good at the character. Beverley Klein is another musicals person and she did a lot of spinging which is annoying usually but she was really funny as Ruth and she’s a good actress, she doesn’t look nearly as old as 47 though. I fancied her more than Mabel which was weird, maybe I shouldn’t admit to that actually.

Sophie-Louise Dann, Lesley Cox and Victoria Ward were the other girls who had solo bits, Edith Kate and Isabel. They were good, they sounded more musicals than operetta but you could tell they were good singers. Deborah Myers was Mabel, it says in her biog she’s a big recording star, I’ve never heard of her to be honest but I probably haven’t heard of everyone. She wasn’t that good really, you really need a light coloratura type soprano for this sort of role but she sounded squeaky at the top and the coloratura was a bit rough. Maybe she was having a bad night though or maybe they’d given her the leading role because she was famous and it was just wrong for her.

Jo Brand was the star though. She was miked up and you could tell she wasn’t a trained singer but seriously, most singers could learn from her. She was almost always in tune and you could hear like every word she sang, she had the best diction by miles and her voice sounded nice, no squeaks or creaks. She’s a proper bass too. And she was really funny, she could do all the humour you get in the role anyway but there was a lot of Jo Brand humour in it as well. She should do more singing.

The staging was done by Peter Mulloy, it wasn’t anything special but you could tell what all the sets were supposed to be and you could get one offstage and the next one onstage really quickly. Then he had a really clever bit at the beginning with the tide rising and this bloke in an armchair and another one swimming, not sure who they were but it was well good. Richard Balcombe was the conductor, it doesn’t say who the orchestra were but it was probably the official Carl Rosa Orchestra. The music was all really good, not brilliant music, not in Mozart’s class or anything but really well played. The whole performance was so fun but don’t tell my mates I said that. Actually you can if you like, I don’t care, there’s nothing embarassing about enjoying a good performance is there?

FitCrit

primi-divi at hotmail.co.uk