Review of Our 2005 Production

Excerpts from the Pioneer Press:

Praise for the show and the production

A melodrama with music, "The Sorcerer" isn't as musically even or dramatically developed as some of Gilbert and Sullivan's later collaborations. But the first full-length piece the duo penned together [at least, the first for which the music survives] glimmers and rollicks with all the tongue-in-cheekiness and winking humor that would come to define the pair's work.

The rarely produced operetta receives a serviceable showing at the hands of the venerable Savoyaires, the Evanston company now in its 41st year of performing Gilbert and Sullivan. The lavishly staged story of romance, love potions and wedding feasts in a rural village of long ago and far away has much going for it: Jennifer Zielinski's playful, detailed costumes, Alison Henderson's witty choreography, and an animated ensemble that, directed by Katrina Williams Brunner, sparkles with joy, energy and just the right amount of insouciance.

Praise for the "glorious" orchestra

In a time when most area theaters go with canned music or a bare-bones ensemble of musicians to crank out the score, the Savoyaires offer a luxurious array of strings, reeds, winds and percussion. They bring a lush intricacy to the score that you'll never hear from a six-person skeleton band or a recording.

Praise for the cast

Chief among the delights above the orchestra pit is Erin Thomas as Constance Partlet, a hormone-infused, blushing, sobbing, giggling rose of a young woman crushing fiercely on the town vicar. Her arias are luminous, her cataclysmic swings from sorrow to exuberance wonderfully droll.

As the young lovers Alexis and Aline, Cary Lovett and Julia Hathaway are also delightful, he as a slightly bombastic manly man and she as the sweet, golden-voiced love of his life. Lovett's got a powerful, sonorous voice, and his chest-thumping recitatives are jolly good indeed.

As the title necromancer, Kingsley Day nearly stops the show with his entrance. He emanates a deliciously shocking combination of the gleeful and cadaverous, leaping about like a happy skeleton and looking for all the world like Ichabod Crane's long-lost brother.

—Catey Sullivan

October 6, 2005

The Savoyaires
P.O. Box 126
Evanston, IL 60204
E-mail: info@savoyaires.org
Phone: (773) 262-2954

The Savoyaires are sponsored in part by a grant from the Illinois Arts Council, a state agency