We’ve not even celebrated the Holidays yet BUT we are already planning what to go see in the new Year, and this is one of the very first things that has been added to the QUEERGUrU diary.
The rather wholesome and jolly operettas that WS Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan wrote to amuse Victorian audiences at the turn of the 20th Century have always been considered wholesome entertainment for the British middle-classes ever since. I have distinct childhood memories watching the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company perform any number of them and thinking how utterly camp stars like John Reed were back then.
Fast forward to now and the artistic director of London’s Union Theatre Sasha Regan has had the inspired idea of re-creating some of Gilbert & Sullivan’s classic pieces with an All Male cast. She has produced five of them to date and her very successful production of HMS Pinafore (the duo’s first international hit) is being revived next April in London’s Wilton Music Hall
Regan never changes the original text or cuts any of the score but the freshness and originality comes in the brilliantly inventive energy with which the numbers are staged. She does however change the setting and HMS Pinafore becomes here a Second World War battleship. Its talented (and very hot looking) crew, dressed in T-shirts, shorts, and plimsolls, double up as Sir Joseph Porter’s sisters, cousins and aunts by merely improvising bonnets round their heads.
Sasha Regan’s all-male H.M.S. Pinafore will run at Wilton’s Music Hall from 15th April until 9th May 2020. The production will then tour to The Theatre Royal, Bath 12-16 May; The Theatre Royal Winchester 1-6 June; The Cambridge Arts Theatre 8-13 June; and Exeter Northcott Theatre 22-24 June..
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