Setting sail for pleasant musical enjoyable

Musical theatre / “HMS Pinafore”, The Queanbeyan Gamers. At The Q, Queanbeyan, till October 23. Reviewed by GRAHAM McDONALD.

GILBERT and Sullivan productions are all about custom. Though these operettas are 140 years or so previous, the humour and the interaction of human feelings nonetheless resonate with fashionable audiences with none main adjustments to the best way the productions have been staged for greater than a century.

For this manufacturing, the setting has been shifted again half a century or so to the Regency interval, with the one apparent adjustments being the feminine characters sporting the high-waisted clothes acquainted to those that watch movie adaptions of Jane Austen novels and permitting Sir Joseph Porter to camp it up in satin breeches and a wig.

Director Jude Colquhoun has saved the manufacturing easy. The set is a minimalist suggestion of a crusing warship’s deck and choreographer Belinda Hassall has created sufficient color and motion to enliven the ensemble scenes with out overly complicating issues for an newbie solid. The orchestra makes use of Sullivan’s unique scoring and performed with confidence all through.

It’s a most spectacular solid. The principal characters are all confidant and expert performers with Katrina Wiseman as Josephine and Veronica Thwaites Brown as Buttercup being standouts. David Cannell’s Sir Joseph and Paul Sweeney’s Dick Deadeye engagingly overacted with Cannell’s occasion piece, “I’m the Monarch of the Seas” cleverly reworked (as is a practice in such productions) to mirror latest political exercise.

The 30-plus refrain utilized themselves enthusiastically all through, with the finale to Act 1 being significantly properly completed. This a posh technical manufacturing, with most, if not all, of the solid fitted with unobtrusive headset microphones, in addition to the orchestra. The result’s a properly balanced sound, nevertheless it was just a bit bit too loud and the general degree could possibly be dialled again a notch or two.

General, this was two hours of pleasant musical enjoyable. The solid seemed like they have been having fun with themselves and the viewers actually was.