Every year the very first days of summer always serve as a reminder that it is time to look in on the Gilbert & Sullivan Scenes program presented by Summer Music West, the summer “semester” of the Preparatory Division of the San Francisco Conservatory on Music, in collaboration with Lamplighters Music Theatre. This afternoon concert is basically the “graduation ceremony” for an intensive two-week program under which kids between the ages of ten and eighteen work closely with the Lamplighters production team. The emphasis is on extended scenes from the full canon of the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, with a few individual numbers interspersed between those scenes. Both the individual numbers and extended scenes are fully-staged with considerable innovative imagination. This year the fullness of scope was best demonstrated at today's performance by the duet “Although of native maids the cream” from Utopia Limited.
As might be expected, there is considerable diversity of skill where most elements of musical technique are concerned. However, the Lamplighters team always manages to come up with clever stagings that fit easily with the capacities of the performers. Thus, while many of the voices are not really strong enough to fill the Conservatory Concert Hall and pitch is not always as sure as it should be, there is no shortage of energy to fill the stage; and a confident sense of stage presence is likely to serve each of these students, even if it is not engaged to support musical talent.
In this respect Lamplighters has as much to contribute to the community through its participation in Summer Music West as it does in its annual subscription season of full-length productions.
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