The Walk from the Garden/Dr Ferret's Bad Medicine Roadshow
Webster's Theatre Glasgow
Mary Brennan
FOUR STARS
Give the young singers and musicians in Scottish Opera's Connect company a cleverly balanced double bill, full of musical contrasts and intrinsic drama - like the one they presented across the weekend - then sit back and enjoy, as they deliver something special, sparked with a mix of keen energy and mature focus.
Stephen Deazley's piece, Dr Ferret's Bad Medicine Roadshow, was first aired by Connect in 2011 when they filled the Citizens main stage with a technicolour whing-ding reminiscent of the Land of Oz. At Webster's - an altogether more intimate black box space - Deazley's witty romp through some of Hilaire Belloc's Cautionary Tales arrives in (mostly) black and white: the colour comes from the performances.
Our Dr Ferret is Andrew McTaggart, an avuncular presence whose baritone warmth promises that his elixir can make bad children good...
The Connect chorus (ages ranging from 14 to 21) revel in the mischief of Belloc and the jaunty, quirky humours of Deazley, while the Connect orchestra kept pace with the snap and rhythmic crackle of the score.
The opening piece, Jonathan Dove's The Walk in the Garden, thrummed with a sombre intensity that demanded much, of the soloists especially. Inspired by Milton's Paradise Lost, Dove uses the expulsion of Adam (Glen Cunningham) and Eve (Charlotte Hoather) from Eden into an earthly wasteland to echo our own self-inflicted loss of natural habitat through climate change.
The chorus, who bookend the piece in thundering volume (as God, then Milton) sit on-stage as Adam and Eve, garbed like jet-setting holiday-makers, scale Dove's heights of remembered joys, despair and resignation.
A fierce, compelling work to which young voices gave a touching truth.
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