Like many of the amateur groups, for many years Dundee Operatic made a practice of dividing their week of performances between two contrasting works. Usually one would be operatic, while the second piece was operetta or even musical comedy. For this season, Faust was played with the still highly-popular musical comedy by Sidney Jones, The Geisha.
The Gounod work was an immovable fixture in the repertoires of the professional touring companies, so might have seemed an unnecessary, if not commercially risky, duplication. However the Society had a far larger chorus than Carl Rosa could afford to take on tour (more than eighty), and with the war so recent a memory, the Soldiers' Chorus would no doubt have seen a standard of well-drilled marching that usually defeated the professionals.
Cast details assembled from newspaper reviews.
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