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POADS - Our History
The Society was founded in 1886 and claims to be in the twelfth oldest
Operatic Company in the country and certainly the oldest in the West of England.
It
began life as a simple Choral Society, renting a rehearsal room in the New Town
Hall at the princely sum of five shillings weekly, But quickly developed into an
excellent Operatic Society, whose first public production was H.M.S Pinafore in
1890.
It is very likely that Mr. Hyde Dendy in creating his Bijou theatre in 1870 set
the stage for Opera in the town. It was the only room in Paignton licenced for
the performance of stage plays.
Broadly speaking the story of the Society falls into three main groups of shows.
The first phase was largely works on Gilbert & Sullivan, mixed in with other
available works on the day, such as " Les Cloches de Cornville" 1901, "Dorothy"
1902 and "Rip Van Winkle" 1904 until a very poorly received "Haddon Hall" in
1911 created a very 20th century cash flow problem and the society sunk without
much trace until afetr the Great War.
The second phase ran from 1922 until 1967 with performances staged mainly in
Paignton's Palace Avenue Theatre and was largely a mixture as before G & S, the
old favourites all presented with varying degrees of success.
In 1970 " The Sound of Music" broke all previous box office records and from
there we have gone from strength to strength, we followed on with other popular
shows including "Fiddler on the Roof" , "My Fair Lady", "Oklahoma" and so on
were tackled and in support 70 - 80 Thousand people paid to see the first ten
new shows presented to the public of Torbay by Paignton Operatic and indeed came
from Plymouth, Cornwall and other parts of the country.
In 1979 the Centenary performance of "The Pirates of Penzance" was staged yet
again at the Palace Avenue Theatre. Then back to the festival Theatre for
"Carousel" in 1980 and we continued with many more successes.
Since then our youth section have expanded and provided the public with a
whole new set of youthful talent and excelling with the diffuculy shows "Les
Miserables" and "West Side Story"
Many of our former cast members have now moved on and are studying to be actors
or involved in the industry in some capacity.
Charlotte Cole (http://www.lotti.co.uk) and Mathew Frow ( Maria and Action in West Side
Story) have both completed thier first year training at The American Academy of Dramatic Arts Hollywood.
(AADA
www.aada.org only take about 8 people from the UK each year)
Second years training is much more concentrated so they have been working
very hard, their course includes stage combat with
Brian Danner this includes
fencing and broadswords !
Alice Chappel ( Cossett in Les Miserables) has recently appeared in All my
Sons at the Little Theatre and is now auditioning for theatrical schools.
Charlie McGinnes ( Jean Valjean in Les Miserables) has appeared in the chorus of Les Miserables in America and
is now back in the UK and has started university.
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