Word: gilberte
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...PASSING of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company last fall was the occasion for just as much gloating as mourning. A vocal contingent of inveterate Gilbert and Sullivan scorners saw the company's demise as a fitting end for the world's leading enforcer of dramatic stagnation. Thousands of deserving new plays are written each year, they grumbled happily--how preposterous it was to sink in so much money to produce the same few operettas over and over again...
...those of us who were weaned on traditional Gilbert and Sullivan--who wore thin the D'Oyly Carte records as children and faithfully attended all the local and high-school productions--this sentiment was not only irritating--it was difficult to countervail. In the face of ever-harder times for new playwrights and non-commercial theaters, how could we justify our inordinate fondness for the costly iron-clad stagings of ten Victorian crowd-pleasers. What could we say to defend our cherished tradition and its domination of artistic resources that would not make us sound like David Stockman...
Alice Brown has gone and made life even tougher for Gilbert and Sullivan traditionalists in her astonishing production of The Gondoliers at the Agassiz Theater. Brown has approached Gilbert and Sullivan's last great collaborative effort completely from scratch, as if she had never seen or heard about its traditional staging. No director of Gilbert and Sullivan, to this longtime fan's recollection, has ever quite ignored the D'Oyly Carte orthodoxy the way Brown has. Wilford Leach, in his successful Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance updated G & S conventions in many ways and even overthrew them...
...Brown and the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players approach The Gondoliers as if it were written yesterday. And--disconcertingly to the devotee of tradition--the result is extraordinary: certainly the most compelling and imaginative production the Harvard Players have offered in recent memory, and one of the most fascinating evenings of theater a decade of G & S-watching has turned...
BROWN'S UNDERLYING INNOVATION is simple but endlessly affecting: She has treated Gilbert's characters as complex, believable, human beings--not the wit-spouting, blissed-out caricatures that have appealed to audiences for more than a century. The female chorus that sings the opening number--a song about their collective love for two gondoliers--is not the usual band of cheerful automotons: they are genuinely smitten, languishing distractedly about the stage and staring into the air. When the inevitable pairing off of male and female choruses takes place, it is no hand-holding affair--they behave...