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Gilbert & Sullivan - Ruddigore / Michell, Price, Trevelyan, Opera World |
List Price: $14.95
Your Price: $13.46 |
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Reviews |
Features:
Description:
Ruddigore, a pseudo-melodramatic ghost story, became most famous for the moment when the portraits of Sir Ruthven Murgatroyd's ancestors spring to life and demand that he uphold the family curse of performing a crime every day. Less flawlessly balanced between score and libretto than some of Gilbert and Sullivan's works, it's a pleasurable trifle set to gorgeous music. Since this is the only version widely available, we're lucky it's so good. Vincent Price is wonderfully typecast as Despard Murgatroyd, the brother who hands over the title and the curse when Ruthven gives up hiding from his evil fate. Price can't sing--and he has a good 15 years on Keith Michell, who plays his older brother--but it really doesn't matter. He carries off his performance with supreme deftness. Unlike many G&S productions, this one is admirably free of mugging; the actors don't condescend to their material. The staging is as beautifully absurd as the plot. The chorus of professional bridesmaids are an indistinguishable unit out of a fractured fairy tale, sleeping in one bed and showing up in the middle of other people's scenes; and during a lovely but dramatically static madrigal, the cast plays croquet. Part of the Opera World series of 12 Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, produced in the early 1980s, Ruddigore is among the best in an uneven project. --David Olivenbaum
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