REVIEW: The Spectre Knight/ The Miller and His Man, Buxton
HAVING made a successful G&S Festival debut last year with a couple of Savoy curtain-raisers, Chapel End Savoy Players delivered another enjoyable double bill this year.
Only one of the pieces performed this time was The Spectre Knight, a curtain-raiser or companion piece as they also known, either way utterly farcical short plays with music.
The FC Burnand-scripted Miller and his Man, described as a drawing room extravaganza and unpublished, has music by Sullivan and this could well have been getting its first-ever public staging after nearly 140 years.
The only evidence of any performance at all is for the London Branch of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society in the 1960s that may have been for members only.
Burnand's potty yarn, designed with Christmas in mind, concerns a miserly miller who wants to marry his daughter to the Marquis de Mincepie, but she loves her father's violin-playing apprentice, the 'Man.' Matters are resolved when the swain meets a pixie who grants him three wishes.
Sullivan's musical numbers, the incidental music being by other hands, is appropriately jolly, pleasant and undemanding and the six-member CESP cast handled it well enough around the basic sets (the fencing looked familiar from last year!) of Rowena Sayer's production.
With a necessary degree of staging imagination, CESP chairman Jackie Mitchell took charge of the equally daft and engaging, twice-as-long Spectre Knight by Alfred Cellier. It served as a curtain-raiser for both Pinafore and Pirates which Cellier conducted, as well as cobbling the overtures to.
Like the work's librettist, playwright James Albery, Cellier was a much celebrated composer in his day and it is obvious from this piece, wordsmith and tunesmith coming up with the goods to provide the piece with a sophistication well above its farcical level.
With Helen Kerr-Wallace performing heroics on an upright piano in the accompaniments, as we found out last year, CESP members have limited vocal and acting ability (though both seemed better this year) but give if their best, work very hard and are, by and large, adequate for charming period pieces which really do not demand much more.
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