IF YOU GOWhat: “The Gondoliers.”When: 7:30 p.m. today and Saturday.Where: UTC Fine Arts Center, corner of Vine and Palmetto streets.Admission: $7.Phone: 425-4645.Website: www.utc.edu.
“It’s kind of a complicated story,” said Perry Ward of “The Gondoliers,” the Gilbert and Sullivan opera opening tonight at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. Ward, an instructor in the music department, is directing.
The back story is this: The infant son of the king of Baritaria has been kidnapped and taken to Venice.
As the curtain rises, the old king has been killed, and the search is on for the heir to the throne. The trouble is, he was once entrusted to the care of a drunken gondolier who mixed up the prince with his own son.
There are conflicting storylines, filled with mistaken identity, secret loves and spoofs of the class wars.
“Finally, there is that one magical topsy-turvy moment at the end,” Ward said, promising a delightful ending to the experience. “It’s one of the those magical solutions.”
Directing a student opera comes with its own challenges, he said, such as convincing the 16 young performers to let go of their trepidation about going over the top.
“This is not subtle,” he said. “This is big comedy. It can be very bold and very broad. These are two-dimensional characters. The further we go with the heightened sense of melodrama, the funnier it is. That’s hard to convince them of in the beginning.”
Another challenge is that undergraduate students don’t always have the worldview or the operatic experience to do a more challenging operatic tragedy.
“Doing a farce is a little easier than doing a big heavy romantic piece,” he said. “We have good students, but they’re students. They don’t quite have the chops yet to go out and sing ‘La Boheme.’ “
Gilbert and Sullivan is lighter, and “a little bit more accessible in English,” Ward said.
Though not performed often, especially in the United States, “The Gondoliers” is on par musically, he said, with the duo’s more famous works, like “The Pirates of Penzance” and “HMS Pinafore.”
Gilbert and Sullivan works were written to be topical to the day, and it has been traditional for individual producers to slightly alter the works for the audience.
For example, Ward said, the use of the 19th-century word “jimp,” meaning svelte or attractive, would not be comprehended by modern audiences.
The UTC production has replaced the word with “fierce.”
“That may not translate to some of my audience, but it will translate to the students,” he said.
The fully staged and costumed opera is being produced, designed and performed by members of the UTC student body and faculty.