Word: gilberte
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Iolanthe is as good as this Henry IV was bad, and a reviewer need not be in his dotage to rave about it. Increasingly, Iolanthe seems to be the favorite work of most Gilbert & Sullivan fanciers. Those who like the gentle, submarine beauty of Sullivan's music claim the best of that is here; others who prefer his loud, brass musical parodies consider the finest of them to be songs like "Bow, bow ye lower middle classes" and "When all night long a chap remains." Those who love the way Gilbert's characters take an inherently silly contradiction and straight...
...FIRST SIGHT, though, Iolanthe doesn't appear to be the high point of Gilbert and Sullivan's career. The first of the two plots concerns Fairyland, a stern Fairy Queen and a half-Fairy named Strephon, who is a Fairy from his head to his waist but whose legs are mortal. As in most G&S operas, there is a foolishly severe law that needs to be broken before happiness can be achieved--in The Mikado it is the prohibition of flirting, in H.M.S. Pinafore it is the prohibition of swearing, in Ruddigore it is the commission of one evil...
...second plot, far and away Gilbert's funniest, concerns the House of Lords. Gilbert has his Lord Mountararat (a name suggesting the aristocracy's excessive reverence for ancestry) proclaim that "If there is a single institution that is unsusceptible of any improvement whatsoever, it is the House of the Lords." This recalls the Duke of Wellington's remark a half-century earlier that Parliament was perfect--on the eve of the Reform Bill...
Peretz's first year at The New Republic was also marked by conflict with his editor-in-chief Gilbert Harrison, ending with Harrison's resignation in January. It is not unusual that the new owner of a magazine should change the masthead. What is unusual is that Peretz and Harrison agreed to sell Peretz The New Republic for $380,000. Then they drew up an ill-conceived and ambiguous contract that allowed the former owner to stay on as editor-in-chief and that caused immediate quarrels over who would control the magazine...
Iolanthe. Gilbert and Sullivan satirize the House of Lords with some of their wittiest lyrics and catchiest music, including the great patter number "The Lord Chancellor's Song." Tom Fuller, a second-year law student who's played G & S heroes from Ralph Rackstraw to Nanki Poo in the past few years, is making his directorial debut If this show is up to the standard of past G & S productions, it may well be the highlight of the winter theater season. Buy your tickets now; by next week they'll be impossible to come by. At the Agassiz, December...