Time Will Tell

Music and libretto by Robert Pollak & Robert Ashenhurst
The Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company, November 2019

After two seasons as the Associate Director for the Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company, I had the opportunity to direct a workshop of this little-known operetta. Time Will Tell presents a portion of the story of Charles Darwin leading up to the publication of his “Origin of Species”, and then has a time-cut to some of the effects it had on academic discourse. This piece was near and dear to the company’s heart, as its success when first performed in 1959 led to the creation of the company.

This piece was intimate, with a small cast, and intended to be performed for a small, invite-only audience. It was primarily a concert reading of the material, with a few embellishments here and there to keep the audience entertained and engaged. My job was to ensure the cast had an intimate familiarity with the source material and the text of the show, to organize our traffic patterns in the space, and to facilitate communication between other departments.

The final product felt inspired by my work with Janus Concert Series, as a few of the behavioral paradigms I had learned about through those projects carried through to this – doing more with less, knowing when to tilt your hat to the audience about the reality of presenting an immersive world in this intentionally non-immersive way, and using a small space to highlight moments of frenetic energy or stillness.