Word: gilberte
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...These Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are delightful little bonbons, really. They appeal to the Anglophile in all of us. Like the imported BBC television shows so popular today, they prey on the transatlantic inferiority complex that leaves most Americans rolling their eyes at anyone who flashes a British accent. The Loeb production unashamedly squeezes every drop out of this tendency, even playing "God Save the Queen" before the overture...
...really can't blame the people involved in this production for reducing Sir William Gilbert's venomous social satire to the level of Broadway musical comedy. That's happened over the decades, and there's nothing any single director can do to change it. Audiences want their G & S lovable, and until someone comes along to persuade them otherwise, that's the way they...
...even after its teeth have been pulled, Gilbert and Sullivan can be wonderfully entertaining--if the musicians and cast put everything they've got into the invigorating score. The Pinafore at the Loeb, despite its abundance of musical and dramatic talent, just doesn't have the energy. It's as though the Gilbert and Sullivan Players took one look at the old standard, let out a long sigh, and resigned themselves to cranking out a competent show, nothing more...
...surprisingly, the audience didn't seem anywhere nearly as bored as the cast with the whole thing. The story of "The Lass that Loved the Sailor" below her station--propelled by Gilbert's jabs at pomp and middle-class mediocrity--still fills an evening. But it was the deliberate self-conscious irony that made something out of Pinafore's obviously inane plot--the hundreds of little jokes in the script that combine to take all the starch out of the Victorian stuffed shirt...
GREG DELAWIE'S direction at the Loeb completely misses its chance to underscore the irony, leaving poor Gilbert's words to stand or fall on their wit alone. That they could stand at all is a tribute to the universality of his satire. No one remembers W.H. Smith any more (the newspaper-stand magnate Gilbert caricatures as Sir Joseph Porter)--except the tourists to Great Britain who still see his name on every other newsstand. But no one can miss this general broadside against sinecures of any kind...