Secco Recit

Okay I'm still really hung up on that horse thing. Is Brian on good terms with Zamor or not? How does Zamor feel about all this? Illustration by Maurice Greiffenhagen.

I give a bit of background information about  Haddon Hall  and its major dramatic issues at the beginning. If you're just here for the production review, you can skip down a few paragraphs. *** The actual Haddon Hall *** The 1892 Sullivan and Grundy opera  Haddon Hall  is sort of like  H.M.S. Pinafore , but on land. Dorothy Vernon is to be engaged to her cousin Rupert, in a generally advantageous match. George Vernon, Dorothy's father, is the Lord of Haddon Hall, and wants the estate to stay in the family. (Rupert, meanwhile, wants the hall all to himself.) But Dorothy is in love with John Manners, a royalist. Rupert shows up, Dorothy refuses him. Dorothy makes plans to elope with Manners. Dorothy elopes with Manners. Parliament grants Rupert lordship over Haddon Hall. Charles II is reinstated to the throne, making Haddon Hall property of the crown, and, at the last second, Manners swoops in with an order from the king restoring George Vernon as the...

Between 1869 and 1875, W.S. Gilbert wrote a the libretti for a series of six "musical entertainments" produced by Thomas German Reed. Four of them had music by Reed, and the other two had music by Frederic Clay. These entertainments were exactly that -- light, family-friendly theatrical productions, in which Reed and his wife Priscilla often performed. These entertainments are of historical interest if you're interested in the history of that sort of thing, but they are not frequently produced nowadays. This is partly out of obscurity, partly out of them not tending to be interesting or robust enough to hold an evening on their own (dinner theater might suit them), and the fact that the original scores of most of them are lost to history might have something to do with it as well. I'm not going to stand here and argue that the German Reed entertainments are hidden masterpieces, because they're not. They are frequently funny, and where music exists it is often plea...

People like to complain about the terrible lessons of the old Disney films. Cinderella is too passive. Belle has Stockholm Syndrome. Ariel is just an idiot. And they've tried to appeal more to modern audiences by deviating from the standard stories and creating more proactive princesses in films such as The Princess And The Frog  and Frozen , often to the point of feeling really self-conscious and heavy-handed. Not to detract from these movies, of course (and certainly not to detract from the scores, most of which are very good and by Alan Menken). I didn't generate these complaints. I'm relaying them secondhand, and relaying them because I think I can offer a suitable alternative. Several of these classic fairy tales have ready-made operatic alternatives with smart protagonists, good morals, good music, and are out of copyright and already Disney-ready. So to the Disney execs reading this (I know you're out there among my half-dozen or so readers I'm sure I dearly ...