First carried out in 1893, Utopia, Restricted was Gilbert and Sullivan’s penultimate opera. Much less instantly profitable than its predecessors, it divided opinion in its day, and stays an unknown amount for a lot of. Depicting an imaginary island so obsessive about British values that, beneath (particularly) English affect, it units itself up, monarchy and all, as a restricted firm beneath the 1862 Corporations Act, it satirises the privatisation of public establishments, in addition to sideswiping at each the “parliamentary peculiarities” of occasion politics and a press fixated on royal scandal.
Dramatically it meanders a bit, and the colonialist assumptions that underpin it now render a few of it suspect. It additionally, nonetheless, accommodates a few of Sullivan’s loveliest music, and Scottish Opera have taken it into their repertory, albeit with some pruning, as a companion piece to their manufacturing of The Gondoliers, first seen in Glasgow and Edinburgh final yr, and now on tour in London.
Directed by Stuart Maunder and performed by Derek Clark, it’s billed as a semi-staging, although it’s significantly greater than that. Utilizing the Act Two Gondoliers set, it’s successfully a full modern-dress manufacturing wherein the fits and cocktail frocks worn firstly are progressively changed by posh tail coats and ball robes as Anglicisation takes over. Effectively conscious that you just don’t must ship up one thing that's already a send-up, Maunder performs it comparatively straight, and it’s fantastically acted and sung by a cultured ensemble solid.
Ben McAteer makes a superb King Paramount, well-meaning, dithering and longing to be freed from his two pushy advisers, Scaphio and Phantis, a cultured double act from Richard Suart and Arthur Bruce. Charlie Drummond is the Girton-educated Princess Zara, in love with William Morgan’s uptight Captain Fitzbattleaxe of the First Life Guards: they sound good collectively in Phrases of Love Too Loudly Spoken, probably the most beautiful love duet in Sullivan’s output. Yvonne Howard, in the meantime, is excellent and terribly sympathetic because the principled Woman Sophy, in love with Paramount, however alarmed and saddened by newspaper gossip about his non-public life. Clark conducts with admirable grace and wit. Taking part in and choral singing are each distinctive.
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