Stage Play

PrincessIda

A Gilbert & Sullivan musical comedy

Presented by CSTHEA Homeschool Players

The Colonnade, Ringgold, GA

Purchase your tickets by April 27th from any cast member and receive $1 off every ticket!!

(Tickets also available at the door; all seats are general admission.)

Adults $8, Students $5, Children 4 and under $3### What is the story of Princess Ida?
“Princess Ida”, by W.S. Gilbert & Arthur Sullivan, is a 3-Act musical comedy. It is a satire based on the much debated Women’s Rights Movement that took place in England during the mid to late 1800’s with the story stemming from Tennyson’s poem, The Princess .

ACT 1 opens with a scene in the pavilion of King Hildebrand’s palace where he and his son Hilarion are eagerly awaiting the arrival of King Gama, his sons, and his beautiful daughter Ida, to whom Hilarion had been betrothed at the early age of one.

King Gama, a small twisted and ungainly monarch, famed for his biting sarcasm, arrives with his three warrior sons but without the Princess, who refuses to leave Castle Adamant, where she rules a woman’s university, in order to surrender herself to Hilarion as his wife.

King Gama and his sons are chained and held as hostages while Prince Hilarion and his two friends, Cyril and Florian, set forth to engage Ida, not by force, but by love.

ACT 2 is set in the gardens of Castle Adamant where Princess Ida has assembled around her a number of highly born young women who, like herself, have sworn to have nothing whatever to do with Man. In due course Hilarion and his friends arrive and clamber over the castle wall and, finding some academic robes, dress themselves up as 3 lady undergraduates.

When Hilarion and his friends meet the Princess she fails to penetrate their disguise and invites them to join her ranks, provided they will undertake never to marry a man and will give the fullness of their love to the hundred maids within her castle walls, rules to which they willingly subscribe!

During a luncheon, Princess Ida discovers the 3 new students are men in disguise and in her anger has the 3 young men arrested and sentences them to death. As they are marched off, King Hildrebrand and his men enter, with Ida’s 3 warrior brothers still handcuffed. The King demands the instant release of Hilarion and his friends and points out that if she refuses he will hang her brothers and level her halls. But despite the pleadings of her girls the Princess refuses to yield.

ACT 3 – Come see a performance to find out what happens!