he first night was not as successful as the other Savoy opera
premieres because of controversy over the title and the revivification
of the ghosts, and reservations about the plot and music. According to
the
St James's Gazette,
"The first act was well received by the audience. Number after number
was rapturously encored, and every droll sally of dialogue was received
with a shout of appreciative mirth."
[19][20]
The interval was long (a half hour) as the elaborate picture gallery
needed to be set up, but D'Oyly Carte had anticipated this and had
printed indulgence slips which were distributed. It was marked by noisy
hubbub when
Lord Randolph Churchill was spotted in the crowd, but a loud shout of "No politics!" brought relative calm.
[21]
The second act, however, ended badly. On 23 January 1887, under the
heading "Their First Flat Failure; The First Gilbert and Sullivan Opera
Not a Success",
The New York Times
reported, "When the curtain finally fell there was hissing – the first
ever heard in the Savoy Theatre. The audience even voiced sentiments in
words and there were shouts and cries such as these: 'Take off this
rot!' 'Give us
The Mikado!'" The paper added, "(T)he name is decidedly against it."
[22]
The performance was hampered by an off night for
Leonora Braham as Rose Maybud and by
George Grossmith's usual first night jitters, a week after which he fell dangerously ill
[23] and had to be replaced by his understudy,
Henry Lytton, for almost three weeks.
[24] Sullivan noted in his diary, "Production of
Ruddigore [
sic] at Savoy. Very enthusiastic up to the last 20 minutes, then the audience showed dissatisfaction."
[25]
Critical reception
On the day of the premiere,
The New York Times,
whose correspondent attended the dress rehearsal the day before,
warned, "The music is not up to the standard of Sir Arthur Sullivan. As a
whole it is largely commonplace ... Gilbert's dialogue in the first act
is here and there very amusing, but in the second it is slow and
tedious."
[26] The press generally agreed with the Savoy audience that the second act of the premiere was inferior to the first.
The Times
opined that "the fun which runs alive in the first act runs completely
dry in the second, which is long and tedious, and winds up with an
anti-climax of inanity."
[27] The Times
praised both the libretto and the music of the first act ("Everything
sparkles with the flashes of Mr. Gilbert's wit and the graces of Sir
Arthur Sullivan's melodiousness... one is almost at a loss what to
select for quotation from an embarrassment of humorous riches.") but
rated the score, as a whole, "of a fair average kind, being not equal to
The Sorcerer but certainly superior to
Princess Ida."
[27] Punch also thought the second act weak: "The idea of the burlesque is funny to begin with, but not to go on with".
[28] The
Pall Mall Gazette thought the libretto "as witty and fanciful as any of the series" though "the second half of the last act dragged a little."
[29] The New York Times reported, "the second (act) fell flat from the beginning and was a gloomy and tedious failure."
[22] According to the
St. James's Gazette,
"gradually the enthusiasm faded away and the interest of the story
began to flag, until at last the plot seemed within an ace of collapsing
altogether."
Bond and
Barrington: Margaret discloses one of her "odd thoughts" to Despard.
The Era commented, "the libretto as a whole is very weak and loosely constructed."
[30] Fun
asked, "Could it be possible that we were to have a dull play from the
cleverest and most original humorist of the day? Alas! It could – it
was."
[31] According to the
Pall Mall Budget,
"the players seemed to be nervous from the start. Miss Braham forgot
her lines, and was not in voice. Mr. (George) Grossmith was in the same
plight".
The Times also criticised Braham, stating that she
"acted most charmingly, but sang persistently out of tune". The staging
was also criticised:
The Times stated, "The ghost scene ... of
which preliminary notices and hints of the initiated had led one to
expect much, was a very tame affair."
[27] The Era thought Sullivan's score "far from being fresh and spontaneous as is his wont".
[30]
Not all newspapers were adversely critical.
The Sunday Express headlined its review "Another Brilliant Success."
The Sunday Times
agreed and stated that the work was "received with every demonstration
of delight by a distinguished and representative audience."
The Observer also praised the piece, though allowing that it "lacks something of the sustained brilliance" of
The Mikado.
[32] The Daily News
applauded the innovation of Sullivan (who conducted, as usual, on the
first night), of conducting with a baton tipped with a small
incandescent light.
[20]
Scholar Reginald Allen suggested that the reviews in the Sunday papers
may have been better than the others because their critics, facing
deadlines (the premiere was on Saturday night, and finished late because
of the long interval), may not have stayed to the end.
[25] Fun, having disparaged the libretto, said of the music, "Sir Arthur has surpassed himself".
[31] The Pall Mall Gazette praised the "charming melodies, fresh and delightful as ever";
The Daily News
wrote that "Mr Gilbert retains in all its fulness his unique facility
for humorous satire and whimsical topsy-turveydom" and praised
Sullivan's "melodic genius which never fails".
[29] Lloyd's Weekly Newspaper said, "Sir Arthur Sullivan must be congratulated."
[33]
Subsequent reviews and reception
Programme from the original production before the name change to Ruddigore
Programme for the original production after the change of title from Ruddygore
Subsequent reviews, written after Gilbert and Sullivan had renamed
the show and made other changes, were generally more favourable. A week
after the premiere, the
Illustrated London News
praised the work, the actors and both Gilbert and, especially,
Sullivan: "Sir Arthur Sullivan has eminently succeeded alike in the
expression of refined sentiment and comic humour. In the former respect,
the charm of graceful melody prevails; while, in the latter, the music
of the most grotesque situations is redolent of fun."
[2] On 1 February 1887,
The Theatre
wrote, "There can be no doubt that by its admirable production of
Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan's latest work the Savoy management has
scored another of those shining and remunerative successes that its
enterprise, intelligence, and good taste have repeatedly achieved – and
merited."
[34] A week later,
The Academy reckoned that
Ruddygore (as it was still called in the review) was probably not so good as
Patience or
The Mikado, nor as "fresh" as
H.M.S. Pinafore, but "it is better than ...
Princess Ida, the
Pirates, and
Iolanthe".
[35] The Musical Times
called the work "one of the most brilliant examples which the
associated art of Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan has brought into
existence," and said that Sullivan had "written some of his freshest and
most delightful melodies."
[36] However, in the view of
The Manchester Guardian, reviewing the
Manchester
premiere in March 1887, "The weakness of his central idea has led Mr
Gilbert into extravagance without wit and parody without point."
[37]
On 5 February 1887,
The New York Times reported the change of name to
Ruddigore.
"In consequence of the criticisms on the piece, the second act has been
changed. The pictures, with the exception of one, no longer come down
from their frames. The houses are packed, as they always are in London,
but the opinion is universal that the thing will be a worse failure in
the provinces and America than
Iolanthe."
[38] In a letter cabled to
The New York Times and printed on 18 February,
Richard D'Oyly Carte denied that the piece was a failure, stating that box office receipts were running ahead of the same time period for
The Mikado, despite the absence of the ailing Grossmith, who was by then recovering.
[39]
He acknowledged that there had been "isolated hisses" on the first
night because some audience members did not like the reappearance of the
ghosts or a reference to the "Supreme Court" (according to D'Oyly
Carte, misunderstood as "Supreme Being") but asserted that both
objections had been addressed by the removal of the offending material,
and that audience reaction had been otherwise enthusiastic. He added,
"The theatre is crammed nightly."
[40]
The American productions met with mixed success. The demand for
tickets for the first night was so great that the management of the
Fifth Avenue Theatre sold them by public auction.
[41]
A "large and brilliant" audience assembled for the New York premiere on
21 February 1887. "After the first half of the first act there was a
palpable diminution of interest on the part of the audience, and it must
be admitted that there were times during the course of the evening when
people were bored." While the critic had praise for many members of the
cast and felt the production would improve once the cast was more
familiar with the work, the reviewer concluded that "Gilbert and
Sullivan have failed."
[42]
On the other hand, the American tour, beginning in Philadelphia six
days later, met with a much more favourable audience reaction. "That the
opera is a great success here and another "
Mikado" in
prospective popularity there can be no question.... The general verdict
is that Sullivan never composed more brilliant music, while Gilbert's
keen satire and pungent humor is [
sic] as brilliant as ever."
[43]
During the summer of 1886, Braham secretly married J. Duncan Young,
previously a principal tenor with the company. In early 1887, shortly
into the run of
Ruddigore, Braham informed Carte that she was pregnant with her second child, a daughter, who would be born on 6 May.
[44] Geraldine Ulmar, the Rose in the New York cast, was summoned to London to take over the role.
[45]
Gilbert ranked
Ruddigore along with
The Yeomen of the Guard and
Utopia, Limited as one of his three favourite Savoy operas.
[46] Later assessments have found much merit in the piece.
[23]
After it was revived by the D'Oyly Carte Opera company in 1920, the
work remained in their regular repertory, and it has generally been
given a place in the regular rotation of other Gilbert and Sullivan
repertory companies. By 1920, in a reappraisal of the piece,
Samuel Langford wrote in
The Manchester Guardian
that "the gruesome strain is the real Gilbertian element" but "the
opera has abundant charm among its more forbidding qualities".
[47] In 1934
Hesketh Pearson rated the libretto among Gilbert's best.
[48] In a 1937 review,
The Manchester Guardian declared,
- It is incomprehensible that Ruddigore should ever have been
considered less attractive than the other comic operas in the Savoy
series. The libretto gives us Gilbert at his wittiest, and in the music
we hear Sullivan not only in his most tuneful vein but also as a master
of more subtle rhythms than he commands elsewhere. Moreover, the parody
is one that all can enjoy to the full, for here the satire is not
pointed at a coterie, nor at this or that æsthetic movement, but at the
absurdities of a melodramatic tradition which is nearly as old as the
stage itself.[49]
In 1984, Arthur Jacobs rated
Ruddigore "One of the weaker of Gilbert's librettos, it was seen (especially after the freshness of invention in
The Mikado)
to be rather obviously relying on brushed-up ideas.... The plot is
supposedly a burlesque of what was 'transpontine' melodrama.... But that
brand of melodrama was itself hardly alive enough to be made fun of. As
the
Weekly Dispatch put it: 'If stage work of the kind caricatured in
Ruddygore or The Witch's Curse is not extinct, it is relegated to regions unfrequented by the patrons of Mr D'Oyly Carte's theatre'."
[50]
Nevertheless, the show has made its way into popular culture in several
ways. At least three murder mysteries concern the show.
Murder and Sullivan by Sarah Hoskinson Frommer, which involves a production of
Ruddigore;
Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood concerns murders taking place during a 1920s revival of the opera.
The Ghost's High Noon by
John Dickson Carr quotes the song of the same name from
Ruddigore. In "
Runaround", a story in
I, Robot, by
Isaac Asimov, a robot, while in a state similar to drunkenness, sings snippets of "There Grew a Little Flower" from
Ruddigore. In the
Doctor Who Big Finish Productions audio,
Doctor Who and the Pirates, songs from
Ruddigore
and other G&S shows, are parodied. In the law case of Banks v.
District of Columbia Dep’t of Consumer & Regulatory Affairs, 634
A.2d 433, 441 fn. 1 (D.C. 1993), the judge cites Robin's admonition to
"blow your own trumpet".