Arthur Sullivan’s first success as a comic opera composer was the short musical farce Cox and Box, to a libretto by one F.C. Burnand.
The collaboration with W.S. Gilbert happened later, and the rest was history.
But if the Burnand and Sullivan partnership was short-lived, Cox and Box, a half-hour three-hander subtitled “The Long Lost Brothers, is regularly performed as a curtain raiser to one of the shorter G and S offerings, and at the LBT this week the Huddersfield G and S Society has paired it with HMS Pinafore.
It is good to get the opportunity to see Cox and Box – an interesting slice of Victorian social history if nothing else – and is well-enough acted and sung by the experienced trio of David Heathcote (as Box), Steven Greenwood (as Cox), and Richard Buxton (as Sergeant Bouncer, their rascally landlord).
On the opening night the relationship between singers and orchestra was occasionally ragged and not very well balanced, and although the vocal tone from the singers was very good (not least in an absurdly beautiful lullaby to his breakfast bacon sung by Box), the diction was not always clear during the sung passages.
The greatly-more familiar HMS Pinafore received a much more confident performance. Gilbert’s satirical absurdities are now on board, with all his trenchant mockery of the social order, his lampooning of the Royal Navy at a period when it was at its most hallowed, and his undermining of patriotic sentiment in the gloriously noble but preposterous anthem that affirms Ralph Rackstraw’s status as a proud Englishman. All of this at the apogee of Empire and British racial pride.
The Huddersfield G and S Society’s regular crew of performers was on board, bringing experience and panache to all the named roles. Paul Richmond seems to be in exceptionally fine tenor voice as Ralph, Elaine Richmond achieves operatic purity as the winsome Josephine and Ann Likeman’s deep contralto is as intriguing as her skill at characterisation in the role of Buttercup.
Gerald Tinson is transformed into a Quasimodo figure as the repellent and vengeful Dick Deadeye, but he also manages, as a sad misfit, to attract some sympathy.
Clarty in the songs is so vital in G and S, and Ian Grange has pin sharp diction. As Sir Joseph Porter, when he sang his famous Ruler of the Queen’s Navee patter song, you could have taken down his every word as if in dictation.
The musical director is Colin Akers and the artistic director is David Fletcher, who ensures that his experienced cast relish in full the faux-pompous language that Gilbert uses to mock the melodramas and popular fiction of his age.
The Cox and Box/ HMS Pinafore double bill runs until Saturday when there is also a matinee.
