I know I explain this every year, but a couple of factoids:

• There is an annual Gilbert & Sullivan festival that takes place every August in northern England.
• I work (regularly, but not necessarily yearly) with a multinational group (Savoynet) that puts on a show every year at this festival.
• So do many other New Yorkers.
• In New York City, we have a Gilbert & Sullivan Society (not connected with the British festival) whose monthly meetings during the ‘school year’ are concerts. These concerts are produced by all sorts of different groups.

Given these factoids, I long ago realized that it was useful to volunteer to produce a Society concert of whatever show my group was going to do at the Festival that summer, as a dry run. I started doing this just for the years where I was conducting the Savoynet show – it allows me (and the other locals) to get a chance to go through the score in a low-stakes fun performance environment. Over the last few years, my buddy Marisa and I have just gotten into the routine of doing it every year, regardless of our role in the Festival production, if we even have one.

So… this year’s show is The Sorcerer. Lovely. I’m not going to England to be part of the Festival show this summer- mostly because I’ve been there the last three years in a row, and also because I md’d the last Sorcerer, and have also done it on stage and in the pit, so it was a good year to let this one go by. But absolutely, I’ll make the Society dry run happen, along with Marisa.

Timing-wise, this year was somewhat odd. We usually try to get the May meeting slot, which allows our performing friends, many of whom would be involved in Blue Hill’s April show, some time to chill a bit. But this year, May wasn’t available and we took June. Also weird, because (and I don’t even remember why) this same general bunch of people just did a Society Sorcerer concert a couple of years ago, and here we were doing it again. Fine, whatever. These concerts are (theoretically) very easy. You have to cast them and find a pianist, but depending on the people and the show, you may not even need a rehearsal, you just show up.

However, over the last couple of years, we’d heard grumblings from Savoynet folks (not locals) that New Yorkers were somehow co-opting Savoynet and was this an official Savoynet production and how dare they, mutter mutter. All seemed silly to me. We were just taking advantage of having a performance laboratory open to us to help those of us in town prepare for the summer show a few months later. But, OK, we’ve taken two steps to at least mildly address this. We don’t at all claim it’s a Savoynet production (it’s not), but also don’t lie about who we are and why we’re producing this particular concert this year.

And… this year we made a real point to invite everyone cast in the summer show who lived in North America to join us. With the understanding that we didn’t expect anyone to fly across the country for what is really a very low-stakes performing opportunity that takes place in a large rehearsal studio with a scant audience. But we did it anyway, to be polite, and who knows, maybe people will want to come anyway.

This paid off in spades this year, making the whole thing kind of extra, to be honest. We had four people come in from out of town: our Aline (from the DC area), our Marmaduke (a Scot who lives in Kansas, but who was on his way home from a conference in Europe), the Savoynet show MD (not me, remember) who came in from Florida and, to our delight, added to our concert by playing clarinet obbligatos, and (most impressive) our Mrs. Partlet, who flew in from Portland, Oregon! We stressed over and over to Mrs. P. how ‘maybe not worth the trip’ this concert was, but she used miles and such and joined us, and we were delighted.

Marisa played piano and I md’d and we had some locals in the Savoynet cast (Constance, Alexis) and filled in the other roles with our friends. And had enough other friends who’d done the roles that we could have choristers ready to fill in as understudies if need be.

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Another way this concert turned out to be way more extra than usual was that one of our crew, G&S scholar Marc Shepherd, had recently discovered, quite by accident, the full scores of three cut songs from Iolanthe. My colleague Will Remmers gets the story from Marc here:

So this was very exciting to our community, and it became obvious that, because of timing and who our group was (and because Sorcerer is a short show), we should also present these three lost songs at the Society meeting.

As it turned out, somewhat simultaneously, Remmers (founder of Utopia Opera) and my colleague Natan Zamansky (founder of Opera Picciona) separately lined up and filmed recording sessions of the three songs (which you can see on their websites). Since I was working with Natan on OP’s “BB66” project, I invited the Picciona Iolanthe folks to perform in our concert, which they agreed to do. (And the baritone, the great Richard Holmes, would also do Dr. Daly for us, as the Savoynet Dr. Daly, a NYC local who had a lead in BB66 as well, was unavailable. Got all that?)

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So Andrew (Marmaduke) was going to be staying with me the nights before and of the show. He was coming in from Europe – unfortunately I had an opera rehearsal that night. Timing-wise, it looked like I’d be able to meet up with him in Manhattan before rehearsal, give him keys, and given him instructions on how to get to my place. As it turned out, his flights and timing got changed. My big fear was that he’d get to town so late I’d have to hang around in Manhattan after rehearsal until 2:00 am or whatever… but as it turned out, our backup plan worked (he found his way to my rehearsal on his own, and I took him home from there). We got caught up a bit, and went to bed.

Saturday, nothing on the agenda except feeding my houseguest and then bringing him to our afternoon rehearsal, which was at the same facility as the evening concert. We had a 3 hour slot for the Sorcerer principals, and hadn’t really set much of a schedule, but I started to get requests, all of which were “can I get there later”. OK, let’s hope we can get at least some stuff done before the latecomers show up. As it turned out, it all worked great. Andrew and I showed up to find Marisa, Mrs. Partlet, Lady Sangazure, Constance, Aline and the Notary all ready to go, and we knocked off most of their stuff before Wells and Dr. Daly showed up. (Alexis ended up bugging out of the rehearsal completely, which was annoying, but I knew he knew the role and would be just fine.) I’d been leery of the idea of Diego, the Savoynet MD, just randomly adding clarinet lines to what we were doing, but he did this extremely thoughtfully and well and it was a definite added bonus to what we were doing.

Wells and Dr. Daly both knew their stuff just fine and the rest of rehearsal went swimmingly. Off to a local pub, where we had a dinner reservation for a large number of people. Friends and choristers joined us and that all went nicely as well.

Back to the rehearsal studios. Generally, the room opens at 7:00 for a 7:30 meeting, so you do have a bit of time to rehearse a couple of bits if you want to, and we needed to run through the chorus bits of one of the lost Iolanthe songs – which I was conducting, even though I was completely unfamiliar with them. Also, I wasn’t entirely sure who would show up and sing chorus, but the Iolanthe soloists who didn’t have Sorcerer roles did chorus, and so did a bunch of our usual suspects, and we ended up fielding quite a large and talented cast for this thing.

Being buried in opera rehearsals for the previous weeks, I had only done a minimal score review myself (I’ve conducted the show, all my markings were there, I just had to follow them) and still found myself doing dumbass things during performance. Like in rehearsal, we’d agreed to cut a long intro, but when Marisa started at the new entrance, I got very confused, expecting the written entrance. Brain fart. But we got past that and there’s always a lot of wiggle room in these things. Everyone performed excellently and the chorus sound was quite something. The Iolanthe songs (which Marc introduced) were really interesting to finally hear – the new Phyllis aria isn’t much of anything, but my new buddy Alice performed it just beautifully.

Photos by Gaby Kogut:

And the larger-than-usual audience was appreciative and there were lots of hugs and best wishes and ‘safe travels’ to those heading home and/or soon off to England!

I brought Andrew home, we sat up for awhile and then went to bed. (I probably was the one who cut it short, “I’m going to bed!”) And we had relaxing time the next morning, he took me out to brunch (thanks!) and headed off to Newark Airport. (unfortunately, the least convenient NYC-area airport from my home) And I wrapped up the weekend laying there like a slug (I’d had three rehearsals and a performance in the span of three days), gearing up for the very tough week of opera stuff coming up.

I always look for lessons learned from these things, but mostly I think we did this as well as could be done. Maybe the lesson is to not be surprised that some people will expend quite a lot of resources to come and play in our sandbox, and that’s a very very cool thing.