Word: gilberte
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...overture to the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players' new production begins, the lights go up on a three-tiered, pink and white stage, with the operetta's title decked across the middle in green icing-like script: "Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride." The highest tier is a small semi-circle at the rear of the stage: around the perimeter, pink columns support a placard bearing one half of a red cutout heart. It's a satisfying moment when the significance of the set suddenly becomes clear: the whole thing is like a giant wedding cake...
...dragoons bounce up and down in rhythm, grimace and moan under the Colonel's weight, and end up overwhelming Propp's noble effort. The chorus's distraction in this scene is especially regrettable because the Players have added a sensational new verse to the patter-song in which Gilbert's original recipe--including "the pluck of Lord Nelson on board of the Victory" and "the humor of Fielding (which sounds contradictory)"--is supplemented by additives like "the biceps of Ryan O'Neal" and "the eyeballs of Kermit the Frog...
...Grosvenor, who inherits the train of lovesick maidens from Bunthorne in the second act. (Audiences at the first performance of "Patience," exactly one hundred years ago today, recognized these two as thinly disguised versions of Oscar Wilde and Algernon Swinburne.) It is an accepted convention in American performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas for the singers to imitate a British accent. The convention is not a sacrosant one: as Broadway's current production of The Pirates of Penzance with Linda Ronstadt and a street gang of pirates testifies, the operettas can withstand unconventional approaches...
FORTUNATELY, it takes more than over-directing to take the life out of a Gilbert and Sullivan winner like Patience. Gilbert's lyrics have vet to be topped by any songwriter for sheer cleverness: in Bunthorne's confession that he is an "aesthetic sham," to name just one memorable example, he sings. "This air severe/is but a mere/veneer.... This costume chaste/is but good taste/misplaced." And Lady's Jane's second-act solo, sung by the exemplary Ethelwyn (Muff) Worden, to this day speaks to the audiences of Doctors Tarnower and Pritikin...
...self-defense is a fundamental one, and if I know how to use a gun and feel I need one for self-defense, whose business is it to say that I shouldn't own one?" After eight years of trying to fight crime in Houston, Police Sergeant John Gilbert is one of many law officers who see merit in this view. Says he: "It's getting to the point where it's up to the citizens to protect themselves. And the way to do that is with guns." (Houston has the second highest murder rate...