Venice is Coming to Belmont!

PRESS RELEASE Venice is coming to Belmont!
The Gondoliers
Presented by The Children’s Music Program at The First Church in Belmont Unitarian Universalist

The Gondoliers by Gilbert and Sullivan will be presented at The First Church in Belmont Unitarian Universalist, 404 Concord Ave, Belmont, MA on November 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. The cast features more than 50 children, who range in age from 4 to 15. It is really exciting to see a cast of such mixed ages put on a production of this scale. The children are all hard at work honing their voices and vocabulary for the challenges of Gilbert and Sullivan’s musical score and comedic libretto. The plot of the opera hinges on one of those classic “mix-ups” similar to Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors wherein two men brought up as brothers were mixed up in childhood, and no one really knows who’s who. The brothers’ names are Marco and Giuseppe, and both have been raised as the sons of a prominent gondolier in Venice, Italy. The brothers, now gondoliers themselves, are married after finding brides during a game of blind man’s buff. Yet one of them, it is revealed, is in fact the Prince of Barataria, a faraway kingdom. The problem is no one knows who is the common gondolier and who is now the heir to the kingdom. They and their friends decide to remedy the problem of not knowing who is who by all traveling to Barataria to rule the kingdom together.

The Gondoliers was first performed at the Savoy Theatre in London in December 1889. It was extremely successful, and ran for 554 performances. By setting the show in faraway Venice and the made-up land of Barataria, the librettist W.S. Gilbert could poke fun at England’s own tradition of monarchy. The First Church in Belmont has only performed The Gondoliers once before, in 1989, when Minister of Music emerita Alfa Radford directed the show. Ms. Radford recalls a very talented cast and that several of the children who starred in the show went on to work professionally in theater.
The Children’s Music Program at The First Church in Belmont has a rich history. Every fall for over thirty-five years the children have put on a musical. Over the past several years they have performed The Sound of Music, The Mikado, Bye Bye Birdie, The Wizard of Oz, and Mozart’s The Magic Flute. Alfa Radford started the tradition of the annual musical as a fun way for the children to get to know each other and have a community endeavor. The Gondoliers is directed and produced by Ian Garvie, Music Director at the First Church. Other directors include Assistant Music Director Simon Andrews, costume designer and backstage director Sandy Nayak, set designer Nate Rono, as well as many other volunteers. They know how to make the musical experience both fun and challenging for the children. The show will be accompanied by a professional pit orchestra.
The First Church in Belmont’s Children’s Music Program is open to all. If you come to the musical and like what you see (and hear!) you are invited to sign your children up for the choir which meets on Monday evenings throughout the rest of the school year. The musical for Fall 2018 will be announced next April. The musical is always all-inclusive. Older children do try out for main roles but everyone is guaranteed a part.

Come delight your senses by traveling to Venice this November without having to book a flight to Italy. Performance times are 5:30 pm on Thursday the 9th, 7:00 pm on Friday and Saturday the 10th and 11th, and a 3:00 pm afternoon show on the 12th. Tickets are $12 and are available on brownpapertickets.com or at the door. They will also be on sale after church services on Sunday November 5th.