Started with raffle and refreshment in the bar. The first turned out to be moderately successful and we are now the owners of some powder room product or other. The second was about half the price of the Wigmore Hall - but, to be fair to this last, not as good.
Subsequent refreshments in the interval were marred by a nearby gentlemen getting very exercised about the sale of land belonging to Epsom Hospital. He may have been right that the end was nigh, but he made a poor choice of time and place. Plus, we are always going to moan when there is talk of running down our local hospital in favour of some larger facility somewhere in the middle distance. Glad it is not my job to sell decisions about this sort of thing to the great British public which, like publics elsewhere, is very keen on having cake and eating it.
The cast and story of the Mikado survived into this modern dress (1950's) version, as did most of the songs, albeit in modified form. But a lot of space was given over to dance routines, some of which required a degree of undress on the part of the girls. And, I would have thought, a degree of proper training. Perhaps there is some overlap or arrangement with our Laine Theatre Arts which, I believe, pumps out a lot of dancers into the floating care home industry and elsewhere.
Older men generally good and the older lady (Katisha) was both good and brave, having quite a lot on display. I missed her splendid lines about daughter-in-law-elect. One of the younger ladies (Yum Yum) was very small and had eyes that flashed. I wondered whether it was the flash of contacts. All helped along by head microphones, which sometimes meant that things were a bit loud.
Someone had worked in a very reasonable amount of topical, political comment.
Orchestra quite small, half a dozen of them. With a double bass doing service for the string section. From where we were sitting, we could more or less see under the stage, from where I associated to my younger brother's talk of playing in the pit for pantomimes at the Arts Theatre in Cambridge. All very odd, with a very low ceiling. Presumably rather sweaty in the summer.
All in all, quite a decent effort. But I still preferred the similarly priced, but more authentic version from Shanklin (on the other island), noticed at reference 3,
By Epsom standards, a clear night for our walk home, complete with moon, stars and some aeroplanes. But no scoring aeroplanes.
PS: we wondered about copyright. In our naval relatives' days with Gilbert & Sullivan in Gosport, there was talk about fiddling with the originals enough to satisfy the copyright owners, copyright owners who cared enough to come and check. Wikipedia talks of life of authors plus seventy, which probably did cover the naval relatives but probably did not cover the present production.
Reference 1: https://www.eloc.org.uk/.
Reference 2: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/04/pinafore.html. Our last outing to see the Epsom Light Opera Company.
Reference 3: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2016/07/mikado.html.
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