Backstage with Gilbert and Sullivan

A Song to Sing, O! takes the audience backstage at a Gilbert and Sullivan production. Shane Gilchrist talks to writer Melvyn Morrow.

For those Gilbert and Sullivan fans who like sugar with their songs, A Song to Sing, O! offers a good sprinkling of the sweet stuff, as well as a few surprises, according to writer Melvyn Morrow.

"It's like addicts getting a new drug. This is a new sugar hit."

Morrow researched and wrote A Song to Sing, O! in the late 1970s, the show making its West End debut at the Savoy in 1981.

It has since been performed both as a one-man show and by a full opera company and has attracted strong audiences in both Britain and Morrow's Australian homeland.

A Song to Sing, O! is a work about Gilbert and Sullivan rather than by the famous duo; it gives the audience the chance to discover the background to the relationships that develop in theatre music between composer, librettist, and performer - in this case singer George Grossmith, through whose perspective the story is told.

"Anyone who likes theatre, if they're honest, secretly wants to go backstage into the dressing room.

Normally, you can't do that, so this takes you there," Morrow explained from his Sydney home earlier this week, a few days before the show plays at the Fortune Theatre, Dunedin, this weekend.

"You go backstage to the dressing room of the great star George Grossmith and you see G&S as it was done. The trick is there are new songs, which add a revelation. It's like addicts getting a new drug. G&S addicts like their sugar. This is a new sugar hit."

Although A Song to Sing, O! provides a chocolate-box selection of Gilbert and Sullivan, including numbers from favourite shows such as The Mikado, Iolanthe and Patience, it also offers hitherto unknown treasures, namely a selection of songs written by Grossmith.

"It is like being a pop fan and discovering six new Beatles songs," Morrow contends.

"The show has got this element of discovery. In most Gilbert and Sullivan shows there is no element of surprise," says Morrow, who has also co-written successful shows such as Shout! The Legend of the Wild One and Dusty: The Original Pop Diva.

"George Grossmith was a huge star of his day. He started in the Sorcerer and went through all the G&S operas right up to The Yeomen of the Guard. On stage, he was utterly brilliant, but off-stage he was very timid and was bullied by Gilbert. If you read between the lines of his two books, you see that he lived in terror of Gilbert."

While researching his production, Morrow met a relative of Grossmith in London and was provided with both insight and songs.

"I'd shown him my draft text of the play - it is a play as well as a musical - and he said I was on the money with alcoholism and drugs. I'd guessed Grossmith was so insecure that Gilbert drove him to morphine. Back then, morphine was legal, but he had reached the stage where he couldn't put up with Gilbert any more. Gilbert was a brilliant director but it was 'my way or the highway'.

"Grossmith was terribly concerned about leaving the company but he made a huge amount of money in America doing his comedy songs. He came back to England, lived a very comfortable life and his son ended up being the manager of Drury Lane Theatre."

One of Grossmith's specialties was the art of "patter", which Morrow describes as the equivalent of today's rap music.

He delivered very fast songs so crisply "that every syllable was thrown to the back row. People loved it because it is so hard to do. That was his trick. All the G&S operas had patter songs for Grossmith and they were usually of a satirical nature."

Christopher Hamilton, who has performed a range of roles in Gilbert and Sullivan productions in Australia, plays the character of Grossmith for the Dunedin shows.

Catch it

A Song to Sing, O! plays at the Fortune Theatre on Saturday at 2.30pm and 7.30pm, and Sunday at 2.30pm.

The show is produced by Martin Kidd on behalf of the Really Authentic Gilbert and Sullivan Performance Trust as an interlude to the trust's ongoing efforts to present to the public of Dunedin every Gilbert and Sullivan opera.

The next in line is The Gondoliers, which is scheduled for the Mayfair Theatre in November.