January

The operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, with their strange amalgam of period wit, tunefulness, absurdity and unquestionable respectability, continue to be played throughout the land, although without the authenticity and strict manner of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, which lived through surely the longest tour ever, from 1875 to 1982, with various necessary changes of personnel along the way. Leslie Baily prophesied that ‘Stage and screen are likely to present Gilbert jazzed and Sullivan streamlined in productions boosted with sex and speed to fit the temper of the age we live in.’ He looked forward to ‘directors who will give us freshly charming interpretations of these Old Masters’. So far as cinema is concerned, he has perhaps looked in vain.

Under the mantle of G and S Productions, the American composer-conductor Victor Schertzinger was the first to attempt a British filmic Gilbert and Sullivan. The Mikado was adapted for the screen by Geoffrey Toye, D’Oyly Carte’s musical director between 1919 and 1924, when he had had the temerity to rewrite Sullivan’s overture to the troublesome Ruddigore. Toye co-produced with Josef Somio, and conducted the film’s score, but his cinematic revision of the original stage work was not especially happy. A muddled prologue doesn’t help matters, while six numbers are cut and other music curtailed, along with some dialogue.

What must those devoted, underpaid, overworked performers slogging away at Gilbert and Sullivan every night of the year up and down the length of the country have made of this? D’Oyly Carte’s chorus got itself into the picture, but at Pinewood only a couple of principals in the current stage production made the transition to screen. The current stage Nanki-Poo, John Dudley, was replaced by the pleasant-enough American singer Kenny Baker. Ivy Sanders and Margery Abbott, the two contemporaneous Yum-Yums, were usurped by British starlet Jean Colin.