This sterile, bloodless performance, recorded in concert, is difficult to comprehend. Richard Egarr conducts a mincing, precious, charmless account of the score featuring a consistently light, “period style” sort of dry articulation and a dynamic range hovering around mezzo. Just mezzo. Add to that the terrible, awful, dreadful, horrible idea of replacing the witty original dialog with narration (either do the dialog or don’t), and a quasi-live audience that laughs at the narrator but remains dead silent at the theoretical hilarity taking place within the musical numbers, and the result has all the character of a lecture-demonstration. It’s not a performance; rather, it’s a discussion of a fossilized specimen of one.
The singers all have good, accurate voices, although in keeping with the tenor of the interpretation, such as it is, they do little to inflect the text, and when they do–as in the Wedding Bells trio–the result comes across as oddly affected and stiff. John Mark Ainsley’s almost Sprechstimme delivery of Sir Joseph Porter’s lyrics adds to the general sense of alienation, while Neal Davies’ Dick Deadeye hardly sounds threatening. The chorus(es) too, so important in this work, lack body, with the men especially wimpy and bereft of gusto. These are supposed to be sailors? This is, in short, a complete waste of your time and money. I would call it a “CD from Hell” but frankly it’s not even that interesting. Our high school production had more soul and genuine theatricality.
