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Recreating Thespis

by

Ronald Orenstein


There have been many attempts to produce a stageworthy version of Thespis. Some involved the composition of a new score; others replace the missing music with other melodies by Sullivan, both familiar and unfamiliar.

Our edition has a long history. It began in 1971, when I was a graduate student at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor. My friend Tom Petiet, director of the U of M Gilbert and Sullivan Society Small Company (later to become the Comic Opera Guild), decided to stage a touring production of Thespis in honour of the opera's centennial. The late Roger Wertenberger and Gersh Morningstar and I selected music taken mostly from lesser-known Sullivan works, and Roger — the musician on the team — arranged the score. Our production (in which I also played Jupiter) toured southeastern Michigan in 1972.

When it came time to prepare a score for the St. Pat's Players production, John Huston and I decided that the Wertenberger version, though useful as a basis for our own, needed to be thoroughly revised. For example, both finales in Roger's score had been drawn from Utopia Limited, which St. Pat's was at that time planning to stage the following year [p.s. — we did Patience instead], and all this music needed to be replaced. For other numbers, John and I felt that there were better choices available. In fact we have only used four numbers from Roger's edition: Nos. 2 (Entrance of Mercury), 5 (Oh incident unprecedented), 7 (Climbing over rocky mountain, in Roger's arrangement for full chorus except for the first chorus, for which Sullivan's arrangement exists), 15 (You're Diana - I'm Apollo) and 16 (Oh rage and fury). A march from The Foresters we use, but in a different place.

Most importantly of all, we now have substantially more of the original score to Thespis at our disposal, thanks to the recent discovery that sections of Sullivan's ballets L'Ile Enchantee and Victoria and Merrie England actually formed the ballet placed, at various performances, either in Act I or Act II during the original production of Thespis. Besides using the "new" ballet itself, courtesy of the Pierpont Morgan Library and Selwyn Tillett, we have been able to fit all of its sections to Thespis lyrics. The St. Pat's edition of Thespis, therefore, contains more of the music Sullivan actually wrote for the opera than in any production since the original run ended in 1872.

Our goals, in both 1971 and 1992, have been the same: to produce an all-Sullivan score; to avoid familiar melodies unless we intended a deliberate joke (we didn't want the production to degenerate into a game of "Name That Tune"); to introduce audiences to some delightful Sullivan music most of them have never heard; and, of course, to produce as close an approximation as we can to a living, breathing version of Gilbert and Sullivan's first opera. As our chief intention was to produce an entertaining piece, we have not hesitated to alter voice lines and keys, or to cut and rearrange phrases, to make Sullivan's music seem as natural a fit as possible to Gilbert's lyrics. However, both in arranging and orchestrating, we have otherwise been as faithful to Sullivan as possible; this is not a "souped-up" score. If someone else wants to produce a "Hot Thespis", let them do so.

However, Sullivan scholars, will want to know where the music came from. Herewith, for those interested, is the answer to that question:

Quite a few people helped us to lay our hands on all of this obscure, and not so obscure, music. They include Tom Petiet, Larry Garvin, Mitch Gillett, John Krueger, and Selwyn Tillett, and they all deserve our thanks — as, of course, does Roger Wertenberger, who may be discussing the results with Sullivan himself as you read this.

Enjoy!


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Page modified 13 March 2011