Word: comical
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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They say that everything old is new again. If you believe that weathered saying, it might help to explain the shiny new face that director Jose Zayas and the Gilbert and Sullivan Players have put on their new production of The Mikado, one of the greatest comic hits of the G&S repertoire: neon-haired schoolgirls straight out of Japanese animation flirt with sharp-dressed business executives juggling briefcases and cell phones. Of course, some also claim that the more things change, the more they stay the same. And that's probably the real reason that this clever, high-energy...
Against such a solid field of performances, though, the show's standouts come from several of the purely comedic roles. Jason R. Mills '99 delivers the show's most delightful comic performance as Pooh-Bah, the state advisor who has taken upon himself all of Titipu's offices except that of executioner. Managing to make one of Gilbert and Sullivan's most enduring and well-known characters unusually likable, Mills retains the character's indispensable stuffiness: "I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmic primordial atomic globule," Pooh-Bah sniffs genially, as he explains his haughtiness to Nanki...
...Augustine '01, too, goes beyond the call of duty as Pish-Tush, a secondary member of the local nobility, brightening the stage with manic clowning and energetically comic embellishments of every conceivable line and mannerism. And Jaclyn A. Huberman '01 busts out in the role of Yum-Yum's sister Pitti-Sing, delivering a hilariously physical performance as the tough-minded and aggressively sexy schoolgirl...
...very large number of people to do something extraordinary. It was never a "no brainer" piece of pop entertainment. Unlike most of the other big productions of the year, it is neither a sequel nor the launching point of a series of sequels. It is not based on a comic book. It was not designed to spawn a vast array of toys, merchandising, video games and theme-park attractions. It is an earnest and heartfelt work. But the same voices that decry the formulaic commercialism of mainstream Hollywood product do not seem to applaud the studio heads...
What's more, it is oddly similar to a very different playwright's latest failure. Neil Simon's Proposals--the comic kingpin's first Broadway effort since Laughter on the 23rd Floor in 1993--is, like The Old Neighborhood, a memory play that doesn't add up to much. Guided by the family's (now dead) housekeeper, we are taken back to the Poconos in the 1950s, on a summer weekend when several characters encounter a new love or are reunited with an old one. It would be nice to describe this as a flimsy pretext for a batch...