This is a film about W.S Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan and their last few musicals.
Jim Broadbent is Gilbert and he is amazing in the role. For those of you who don't know much about Gilbert and Sullivan because they are light opera, Gilbert was the lyricist and Sullivan the composer. They wrote a lot of musicals with their hits being 'Pirates of Penzance', 'HMS Pinafore', 'Ruddigore', 'Patience' and 'The Mikado'.
this film shows the struggles they had with their last couple of musicals. Princess Ida brought up the issue that Sullivan had composed as much music as he was able to and was now just repeating himself in pieces throughout the play. Gilbert starts to write Libretto's that are very similar to his previous libretto's. Sullivan refuses to set one of the libretto's to music because it is too similar to 'The Sorcerer'. After a long feud between them, Gilbert goes to a Japanese festival and there he finds his inspiration for 'The Mikado'.
Andy Serkis is the choreographer and does a stunning job of wearing tights around... I do commend him for his performance. Timothy Spall plays the character that plays Mikado and he is equally as brilliant in his role as he struggles to master to the style of dancing. His voice is fantastic though!
Ron Cook stars as D'oyle Carte (the leader of the D'oyle Carte opera company). If you don't know who that is, He was the guy that was in charge of finding all the actors and musicians to perform the musicals as they were written. Gilbert and Sullivan were contracted by this company and so everything they wrote went to the company first who then organised productions and tours. Sullivan did of course actually conduct all the performances of his operas.
Go ahead and watch it, even if you know nothing about them or their works, you soon will from this film. It's not boringly educational, just educational enough to make it all fit in nicely.
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