The Premiere of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Ruddigore took place on this date in 1887. This is my personal favourite having participated in a production of it as a student. 10 things you might not know:
The full title is Ruddigore; or, The Witch's Curse.
It was the tenth of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas.
The opening night wasn’t a great success. The audience compared it unfavourably with The Mikado, which preceded it. Some people actually booed and others heckled: “Take off this rot!” and “Give us back The Mikado.”
At this point the title was spelled Ruddygore, which didn’t help. Prudish Victorians thought it sounded too much like “bloody” which to them was a heinous swear word. So an "i" was substituted for the "y".
Gilbert himself admitted later that he’d considered changing the title completely to Kensington Gore, or Robin and Richard were two Pretty Men. Sullivan and Carte persuaded him to leave the title alone and merely alter the spelling.
The plot concerns a line of baronets living under a curse. The first baronet burned a Witch and as she died, she cursed him and his line, to the effect that if the baronet did not commit a crime every day he would die in agony, thus forcing every inheritor of the title to become a villain. Until one heir, Ruthven, runs away and lives as a simple farmer called Robin Oakapple to avoid the curse and leave his younger brother saddled with it. Robin is making romantic advances to a girl named Rose Maybud, but just as he seems to be getting somewhere, he’s ratted out by a sailor, Richard, who knows the truth. He comes home from sea and takes a fancy to Rose himself.
Robin is forced to become the latest villainous Murgatroyd and is haunted by his ancestors whose paintings come to life to taunt him. His brother, meanwhile, is free to pursue his childhood sweetheart, Margaret, who went mad after he, as the bad baronet, dumped her. Ruthven figures out how to foil the curse. If he deliberately fails to commit a crime each day, it’s tantamount to suicide. Suicide is a crime, so job done. He can live a virtuous life, marry Rose and live happily ever after.
Gilbert ranked Ruddigore along with Yeomen of the Guard and Utopia, Limited as one of his three favourite Savoy operas.
There have been numerous references in literature. The novels Murder and Sullivan by Sara Hoskinson Frommer and Ruddy Gore by Kerry Greenwood are both set during a production of Ruddigore. The Ghosts' High Noon by John Dickson Carr was named for the song in Act 2. Isaac Asimov refers to it as well in a story called Runaround, in which a robot sings another song from the score, There Grew a Little Flower.
Ruddigore is usually set in the Regency period, but there has been a production set in the 1940s, the golden age of cinema in which incorporates film genres of the time, such as hard-boiled detective dramas, film noir, screwball comedies, and movie musicals and incorporates dialogue from classic movies.
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