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My fifth year at the Gilbert & Sullivan festival I was cast as Florian in Savoynet’s production of Princess Ida. I had been in Ida once before, in Houston, where I played Synthius while understudying both Florian and Gama.
I had worked with Diana Burleigh, our director, once before, in Iolanthe in 2005. I therefore knew enough to be excited at the chance to work with her again, in a more significant capacity: Diana is both pleasant and fun to work with, and extremely competent. She had an interesting concept for this production: we restored some of Tennyson’s prologue from ‘The Princess’ (the original source material for Ida) and made a pre-overture prologue in which a family party gave way to a fun game of make-believe, in which we acted out the story of Ida. I thought this was a particularly apt choice, in that it made the romance of Hilarion and Ida (Walter, Jr. and Lilian) more sensible and sensitive, and also blunted some of the jarring apparent sexism in the original.
The principle cast, I thought, was outstanding. It was:
- Leon Berger, Hildebrand
- Peter Büchi, Hilarion
- Christopher Diffey, Cyril
- Jonathan Ichikawa, Florian
- Sam Silvers, Gama
- Tony Smith, Arac
- Stuart Pinel, Guron
- Stephen Hill, Scynthius
- Jane Brendler Büchi, Ida
- Julie May, Blanche
- Vikki Willoughby, Psyche
- Christine St. Pierre, Melissa
- Meriel Bartlett, Sacharissa
- Mary Finn, Chloe
- Carol Davis, Ada
Leon, Peter, and Christopher, in particular, were delightful and exciting to work with. They all had a tremendous amount of experience and talent. Much of Florian’s business, if you know Ida, is with Hilarion and Cyril, so I was working closely with those two excellent tenors quite a lot. Here are our two trios:
One interesting performing insight I got from so much trio work is that it’s particularly important to plan carefully, and to watch one another — more so with trios than with other configurations. Typically, when you’re performing, some movements are explicitly planned and directed, and others are improvised or spontaneous, or at least self-generated. If you have a whole chorus, certain moves are all together, and other decisions, like what direction to look, or how to hold your hands, are made at an individual level. Likewise with a solo or a duet. But with a trio, the spontaneous bits must be handled with care: for if two of the three make the same decision, the third looks like he’s doing it wrong. It’s like ‘Set’ — you want them all different or all the same.Here are some pictures from this production on facebook:
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