to be honest you pretty much got it with essgee utopia and OH my god i love it
i went to see it on my own and the first thing i noticed when i walked in was “okay why the hell can i hear a glockenspiel and a piano in the orchestra pit, i might not know utopia that well but i know it well enough to know that neither of those instruments are present in the score”. Turns Out that the reason i head a glockenspiel and a piano was that the musical director had rescored the whole thing, in a modern musical theatre style, to better fit both the performers and the setting. when will your fave ever?
note on better fitting the performers: wmos is a musical theatre society, not an opera society, so vocally their style suits a more musical theatre (stephen turnbull deemed it bossa nova) style than the original music style. on top of that, they had a chronic lack of men, as sometimes Tragically Happens. there were no men in the initial portion of act i, and their chorus of men eventually totalled two (yeah.), with four male flowers of progress and two of the flowers of progress (i can’t tell them apart so don’t ask me to) commuted to women.
i should point out: rather than the usual flowers of progress, the flowers of progress were as follows:
- kate middleton
- prince william
- prince andrew
- prince charles (mr. goldbury)
- camilla parker-bowles (the flower of progress who hangs out with mr. goldbury and the princesses during act ii)
- prince harry (fitz)
this also meant that princess zara was implicitly meghan markle, but she kept the name zara. there were people who complained about it (“grumble grumble, mocking the royal family, would never have happened in the old d’oyly carte, grumble grumble”). but i’m going to guess those people have yet to work out the fact that gilbert and sullivan is, by nature, satirical. so those people don’t count.
other changes included lady sophy being mary poppins, rewriting lyrics of various songs, including “a wonderful joy our eyes to bless” being turned from casual racism into prince charles singing a love song in favour of camilla parker-bowles (which was HILARIOUS, and his impression was spot on). also one thing i particularly liked was the fact that this meant that the two younger princesses didn’t end up hooking up with men old enough to be their fathers, so a wonderful joy and the quartet were more paternal than they were creepy.
don’t get me wrong, i love the quartet because it’s the least dull part of a dull act of a dull show. but at the same time, it is just objectively creepy that these two guys are flirting with two extremely innocent and sheltered young women who are young enough to be their daughters. but i digress.
the gay report: scaphio and phantis (who i still can’t tell apart but i met the one who wants to marry a translucent woman and he was incredibly nice and really pleased to hear that somebody enjoyed his opera) got together at the end. also, and i thought this was nice, tarara was nonbinary. that’s just about it for Things Being Gay but it made me pretty happy. (and it’s pretty remarkable that this is one of the last things i am talking about rather than the first, since You Know Me.)
anyway, and i’m sure you have heard this by now, the f u c k i n g adjudicator absolutely destroyed them. i didn’t stay because frankly i don’t care to hear anybody’s opinions on a show i liked (although i do agree that the choral singing could have used work), but on top of the fact that he didn’t even nominate them for any awards let alone give them any during the adjudication he not only didn’t say anything good (and, objectively, even if you despised it in every other way, eagle high, which is a particularly difficult chorus, was excellent), but said that he wasn’t even going to comment on the principals. also people applauded when he completely ripped them apart.
now don’t get me wrong, me personally, if an adjudicator completely destroyed something i had spent months working on, i would just go more in the direction that he had hated next time around. you didn’t like my modern musical theatre utopia? well then, sir,
WELCOME TO MY FUCKING HEAVY METAL MIKADO, THAT YOU, FOOL THAT YOU ARE, BROUGHT DOWN DIRECTLY UPON YOUR OWN HEAD
but that’s just me, and because i am a self-confessed Petty, Opinionated Asshole, i can quite see that not everybody would amp up the Controversy all the way not just to eleven but to twenty while making direct and confrontational eye contact with the adjudicator.
(this is in much the same vein as the reason i was Fucking Mad when last year’s adjudicator described a company as being “too young”, too fucking young, because their average age was in their 30s. my response to this is next year: iolanthe with a cast made up entirely of seven year olds. celia (or leila) stares straight at the adjudicator when she says “no-one to look at you would think you had a son of twenty-four!”) somebody slightly less… i don’t know what the word is but there is one and it’s probably “stupid” or “self-destructive” than me would probably be more inclined to move away from the festival and not bring anything there, and it would probably discourage the majority of people with similar ideas from trying to present their ideas at the festival, because why bother if it’s just gonna be destroyed. but that’s an opinion for another post and, indeed, for another day.
anyway tl;dr i thought it was good although there were some bits that needed work as well as there being one or two jokes that didn’t land. however, the audience and adjudicator reaction to it is indicative of the wider problem with gilbert and sullivan as a whole. if i were teaching a highly specific class about Updating Theatre i would use it as a case study.
and now I want Metal Mikado, because imagine the Punishment and Crime song
Mooncustafer 