IT IS difficult to believe that exactly one year ago Yeomen of the Guard was performed to very appreciative audiences at Haberdashers' Monmouth School for Girls by Monmouth Operatic Society - "my, don't time fly when one is enjoying oneself." This must be "almost" a quote from that great wit W S Gilbert.
For their 14th season the Society is in the final stages of rehearsal for Ruddigore - the twelfth Gilbert and Sullivan opera to be produced by Monmouth Operatic Society. Only one more and they will have completed the cycle (except for Thespis which nobody can perform because it is believed that the music has been lost!).
Some call Ruddigore a connoisseur's opera, similar to Patience and Princess Ida. However, it contains some of Sullivan's most beautiful music set to Gilbert's memorable text, so often quoted. Today Ruddigore has quite a wide circle of admirers, especially among those people (and they seem to recur in every generation) to whom burlesque melodrama is always irresistibly funny.
Ruddigore is very much a ghost story and in Act 2 the picture gallery in Ruddigore castle comes to life "before your very eyes."
It is an opera for everyone who enjoys "good" theatre and with its talented membership of performers Monmouth Operatic Society hopes to give its audiences thrills, spectacle and "leave you with feelings of pleasure." After all, you have to be a little mad to work week after week, month after month, learning words, music and complicated movements etc. To quote one of the principal characters in the opera Mad Margaret in Act 1 - "Hide, they are all mad - why? Because they sing choruses in public. That's mad enough!"
Tickets are on sale now from Stephen's Bookshop, Church Street, Monmouth, and Society members. Performances are from April 3rd-7th at Haberdashers' Monmouth School for Girls.
CCS.