Review: Gilbert & Sullivan: Ruddigore ****

IF you plan to only see one show this year, make sure it is Opera North's romp through Gilbert & Sullivan's story of spooky happenings in the Cornish village of Rederring.
By The Newsroom
Published 5th Feb 2010, 10:35 BST
Updated 5th Feb 2010, 10:35 BST

Ruddigore was one of the famous partnership's most spectacular failures, though if Jo Davies, the director of this new production, been around at the time, it would surely have been one of their greatest triumphs. It was as a young teenager helping an amateur operatic society backstage that she first came into contact with the score and at every twist and turn she milks the last drop of humour from this absurd story. She plunders just about every music hall joke from short dance routines, funny walks, a parody on Victorian melodrama and a series of lecherous and wicked baronets.

Working within a series of large sets she adds to the visual pleasures with highly attractive costumes.

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Amy Freston as Rose Maybud, has the looks and voice to make the character believable, while as her equally shy boyfriend, Robin Oakapple, Grant Doyle, has the ideal lyric tenor voice and the excellent Robert Burkhard as the dastardly Sir Despard Murgatroyd, deserves to be hissed off the stage. Sullivan's original score is heard for the first time in 120 years, the conductor, John Wilson, drawing immaculate playing from the Opera North orchestra, and on stage the company's chorus is outstanding.

Grand Theatre, Leeds

February 12, 13, 17 and 20, then touring to Salford, Newcastle and Nottingham.