Word: gilbert
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...unenviable responsibility for King Gama, a not-overly-pleasant example of Gilbert's penchant for uglification, falls to Arthur Waldstein, who emerges victorious if not triumphant...
Sometime in the life of every Gilbert and Sullivan company there arises the onerous necessity of mounting Princess Ida--usually after all other possible expedients have been tried. Unfortunately, only Gilbert and Sullivan have ever succeeded in writing a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, and even they only wrote a few. Ida is second-rate, but authentic; a weak sister, but still one of the family. This production is unlikely to make any fanatical converts, but Agassiz these days is still a pretty good place in which to forget worldly cares...
...about education for women, and it shows Gilbert at close to his worst. Behind the gruff whiskers, fat belly, and sharp tongue there lurked a small, narrow, smug, Philistine, and thoroughly reactionary mind, and a nagging weakness for the most squalidly dull-thud variety of pun. Both these latter qualities are prominently on display in Princess Ida. Moreover, some mad infatuation (something, perhaps, to do with the Tennyson poem of which Ida is a parody) led him to cast the thing in blank verse, of the sort Shaw must have had in mind when he said that blank verse...
Aristophanes' Clouds, when produced in competition in 423 B.C., didn't even cop second prize; but it has since taken its rightful place among the masterpieces of satire, rivalled only by some of the works of Moliere, Gilbert & Sullivan, and Shaw. It is particularly appropriate for the Cantabrigian community, for it is perhaps the most brilliant treatment ever given to the controversy over traditional vs. progressive education; arguments about "why Johnny can't read" are nothing...
Although many G. & S. buffs feel that the operas can only benefit from the removal of copyright restrictions ("Throw out the petition!" wrote one newsman. "Every last cliché, comma and full stop of it!"), Purist Alderley was more determined than ever to protect W. S. Gilbert from the depredations of popular arrangers. One, last week, even wanted to give lolanthe a "honkytonk beat" and retitle it Zaza Has a Piazza...