Opera della Luna (OdL), founded in 1994, is a British touring theatre troupe of actor-singers focusing on comic works. Led by artistic director Jeff Clarke, it takes its name from Haydn's operatic setting of Goldoni's farce Il mondo della luna. The company presents innovative, usually zany and irreverent, small-scale productions and adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan, Offenbach and other comic opera and operetta, in English. OdL is a registered British charity.
After directing his own touring opera ensemble in the 1980s, Clarke formed OdL in 1994. He soon began producing touring adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan operas and well-known operettas, like The Merry Widow, Die Fledermaus and several Offenbach pieces. The company has also presented shows and concerts on the QE2 cruise ship and elsewhere, annual Christmas pantomimes and summer or festival productions. Other pieces have been by Donizetti, Verdi, Strauss, Mozart and Bernstein.
The company has generally undertaken two major tours each year, visiting more than a hundred mid-scale venues throughout the UK in some years. Occasionally the company has toured overseas. Clarke directs all of the productions, which are mostly small-scale adaptations performed without chorus, accompanied by a small orchestral ensemble.Opera della luna official website , accessed 12 November 2009
History and description In 1986, Clarke founded The English Players, a touring opera ensemble. His productions for that company included English-language adaptations of Love in a Village (which toured as far as Denver, Colorado), Boieldieu's The Caliph of Bagdad and Abu Hassan (two one-act operas presented together), Il mondo della luna and Robinson Crusoé. After four years, Clark disbanded The English Players while he planned for a new, better-funded company.Clarke, Jeff. Borrowed Light: A retrospective of 15 years on the road with Opera della Luna, Jeff Clarke and Opera della Luna, Bicester (2010).
With the help of marketer and versatile theatre professional Graham Watson, Clarke established Opera della Luna (OdL) as a registered charity with a board of directors and a base of regular supporters. The company's name, adapted from the name Il mondo della luna, is intended to convey its zany style of adaptation. OdL's first production, in 1994, was Robinson Crusoé. Plagued by transit strikes, the show lost money.Bradley, p. 86 Clarke and friends made up part of the deficit by playing evenings of music hall concerts. The company recovered and has toured successfully ever since. In 2010, Clarke described OdL's first 15 years in a memoir of the company organised around photographs of its productions, Borrowed Light: A retrospective of 15 years on the road with Opera della Luna. The book describes all of the company's productions up to 2010 and includes cast lists. Ten years later, in celebration of Opera della Luna's 25th anniversary, Clarke published a further similar volume, Borrowed Light 2: Another 10 Years on the Road with Opera della Luna.Clarke, Jeff. Borrowed Light 2: Another 10 Years on the Road with Opera della Luna, Bicester: Opera della Luna
Gilbert and Sullivan adaptations
Parson's Pirates The company achieved its first theatrical financial success in 1995 with Clarke's adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance called The Parson's Pirates, about the vicar of St Michael's Under Ware, who is tasked with raising church funds through an amateur production of Pirates. The original idea had been merely to produce an evening of Gilbert and Sullivan hits with five singers. Clarke wrote, in his 2010 memoir,
Actress Louise Crane played Ruth and is still a member of OdL. Choreographer Jenny Arnold had worked on Robinson Crusoe with the old company and has continued as choreographer ever since. The piece (and all of OdL's subsequent G&S pieces) is played without chorus – principals are assigned to cover choral lines in the music, in sometimes startling and amusing ways. The original three-night stand was a surprise hit, and touring followed. Since then Richard Suart and Ian Belsey have performed in the production numerous times. Critic George Hall wrote that the production "is an evening of brilliance, both a tribute to and an affectionate send-up of [Pirates], done with verve, style, some excellent voices and a hefty quotient of camp. With Richard Suart ... we know we're in for a treat.... Ian Belsey [and the rest of the cast] are all great fun and Jeff Clarke directs the whole at a cracking pace.... This is a show both for Gilbert and Sullivan devotees and for novices.... In short, a total treat – irresistible and unmissable."Hall, George. "The Parson's Pirates", The Stage, 19 September 2002
Ruddigore and Mikado Three other G&S adaptations soon followed, with direction by Clarke and choreography by Arnold, all adapted for a cast of 6 to 8 and no chorus. The first was The Ghosts of Ruddigore (1997), where a couple of nerds, Amanda Goodheart and Kevin Murgatroyd, have car trouble like Brad and Janet in the Rocky Horror Show. They find themselves in the spooky Brigadoon-like village of Rederring, where they discover their ancestors and become embroiled in the tale.Bradley, p. 87 One reviewer said that the production supplied "Belly laughs, baronets and more than a touch of Blackadder".Hanning, Elaine. "The Ghosts of Ruddigore: Belly laughs, baronets and more than a touch of Blackadder", Jersey Evening Post, 19 June 2002Darvell, Michael. "Theatre Reviews: The Ghosts of Ruddigore", What's On (London), 4 September 2002, p. 51
Next was The Mikado (1998). The company's updated adaptation is set in a hip tailor/design shoppe and inspired by the sexy, flashy world of fashion. As Clarke described the genesis of the production, he was in New York City over Christmas 1997 and visited the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which was showing a special exhibition of the work of Gianni Versace. "I was confronted with a dress; a cheeky mini-crinoline, sexy and sassy, classical and witty. The startling originality, colour and fun of it hit me like a blow – imagine three of these – the three little maids! Remembering that Ko-Ko, before his elevation to Lord High Executioner, had been a cheap tailor.... the germ of an idea started. Why not make Ko-Ko a designer? ... a Jean-Paul Gaultier – camp, outrageous, and bursting with creativity and invention. This gave the green light to filling the stage with all sorts of over-the-top theatrical fashion creations". Clarke engaged fashion designer Gabriella Csanyi-Wills to create the costume designs; she originated the idea to make the second act set, Ko-Ko's garden, out of fabric. Clarke decided that Katisha would be based on the older women in Dallas or Dynasty. "Women long past the first flush of youth, but determined not to grow old gracefully. ... [If] she becomes a sympathetic character, the whole plot collapses. But the ridiculous picture of a woman in love with a man half her age is one we are all familiar with ... the key to what makes Katisha pitiful." This production, featuring Simon Butteriss as Ko-Ko and the Opera Babes as Yum-Yum and Pitti-Sing, also became a success, and theatres were eager to book it. One new opportunity for the company was the chance to showcase the production at the 1999 Covent Garden Festival – OdL's first London performances – and at subsequent Covent Garden Festivals. The production continued to be very popular on repeated tours.Beale, Robert. Review: The Mikado, Manchester Evening News, p. 10, 18 January 2008
H.M.S. Pinafore, The Sorcerer and The Gondoliers
H.M.S. Pinafore was first presented in 2001 on the QE2 cruise ship and sailed as far as Australia. Clarke's adaptation was designed to meet the ship's one-hour time limit for entertainments. This was repeated in subsequent seasons on the H.M.S. President, a ship moored on the River Thames that doubled as the Festival Club for the Covent Garden Festival (Julia Goss played Little Buttercup), and in 2002 on a different cruise ship with both Pinafore and Mikado. In the energetic opening scene of Pinafore, the company erects the H.M.S. Pinafore right before the audience. Clarke noted, "Many an old sailor, when his sea-faring days were over, worked on the fly floor of a theatre ... used to signal cues to fly the scenery by whistling. That is the origin of the theatrical superstition that it is bad luck to whistle in the dressing room. ... I wanted to find some visual way of showing this connection, so to have the sailors "flying" the scenery by pulling the ropes and tying them off would be a great trick. The company's typically zany version of Pinafore is played in Victorian dress with few textual and musical changes from the original.Beale, Robert. "Luna-tic Pinafore is a shore-fire triumph", Manchester Evening News, 25 March 2009."Fun on the high seas" . The Press and Journal, 22 April 2010, accessed 27 April 2010
OdL has performed all of its Gilbert and Sullivan productions at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival nearly every year since 2003 as well as touring them extensively.Lewis, Peter. "Pirates are such a curtain raiser!", Hexham Courant, 19 October 2007 Another G&S-related piece is The Burglar's Opera, with a script by Stephen Wyatt, based on W. S. Gilbert's 1890 short story, Burglar's Story, mixed with elements of The Threepenny Opera. The music was adapted by Jeff Clarke from Arthur Sullivan's orchestral music. This toured in 2005 and 2006.Gillan, Don. "The Burglars Opera", stagebeauty.net, 2006, accessed 4 November 2009 In 2007, Clarke introduced a new piece called Nightmare Songs in which Simon Butteriss plays an understudy to the principal comedian of a fictionalised D'Oyly Carte Opera Company during World War II and must be ready to go on at very short notice to play in any of ten G&S patter roles. Clarke plays another resident of his lodging house, an itinerant "variety" performer who assists and hinders the patter man's nightmarish rehearsal. The two men have performed the piece many times.Lisle, Nicola. "A nightmare that's a dream come true", The Oxford Times, 5 April 2007
The company's adaptation of The Sorcerer was first produced at the 2009 International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival. The setting of the opera is updated to the 1970s, and the love potion causes Dr. Daly to fall in love with Alexis, rather than Aline. Clips from the Buxton presentation are included in a 2010 Sky Arts TV series about G&S, narrated by Butteriss, called A Motley Pair. OdL toured the production repeatedly over the ensuing years. A review called the show "one of the most delicious musical feasts on the circuit"."Review: The Sorcerer", Bucks Free Press, 14 October 2009 Another review commented, "Sharp and witty, it oozed fun and inventiveness while satirising the class structure of English village life and marriage. ... The uniformly good cast have fine voices, allied to stagecraft and excellent comic acting skills. They delivered the piece with pace and panache. Clever use of tableaux and excellent sung and spoken diction ... ensured total enjoyment."Wilkinson, Lyn. "Sparkling performance will ensure popularity", Newbury Weekly News, 6 August 2009, p. 2Coffey, Catherine. The Sorcerer at The Oxford Playhouse. Oxford Theatre Review, 15 June 2011 The company toured this opera extensively in the years following its premiere as part of its regular repertory.