Word: mikado
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Like the Mikado, who sentenced prosy society bores "to hear sermons from mystical Germans who preach from ten till four," imaginative judges like to find ways to make the punishment fit the crime. San Diego Municipal Judge Artie Henderson sends teen-agers caught purse snatching from old ladies to work in convalescent homes. Graffiti artists in New York City have been ordered to swap their paint sprayers for cleaning brushes. A professor arrested in a protest demonstration was sentenced to write a 1,500-word essay on civil disobedience, while a thief who stole some saddles from a farmer...
...Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance is one of the best known of the Gilbert and Sullivan canon. The show has very little dialogue; there's nothing here, for instance, to rival the verbal pyrotechnics between the two peers in Iolanthe or the pompous flatulence of Poo-Bah in The Mikado. Pirates' fame derives rather from its score, which is a typical G&S mix of rousing chorus numbers, patter songs and take-offs on Italian grand opera...
...CONSERVATIVE production by G & S criteria, The Yeomen of the Guard is happily bereft of the gimmickry and contemporary updating that characterized recent versions of the more popular Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore; the audience's relative unfamiliarity with Yeomen has allowed director John Campbell Butman to forswear innovation, since whatever happens on stage will be new. Butman also abandons much of the elaborate stylization which shaped the performances in this fall's production of Iolanthe, encouraging his leads to act with greater naturalism and leaving the contorting and caricaturing to the lesser characters...
These minor characters are not quite as pivotal or as interesting as in some other Gilbert and Sullivan operettas--there's nothing here to compare, for example, with the posturings of the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe or Katisha's ravings in The Mikado--but they still offer marvelous opportunities for comic mugging. Scott Meadow turns in a sharply defined performance as Wilfred Shadbolt, the "assistant tormentor" who eventually wins Phoebe's hand (but not her heart). A typical Gilbert and Sullivan "light heavy," Meadow's Wilfred is too ridiculously self-important and gullible to be really threatening. Carol Flynn also...
...orchestra, on the whole, is far more impressive than last year's. The string section in particular sounds rich and full, without any of the strain and occasional discortlance that characterized Patience or The Mikado. The trumpet fanfare at the entrance of the Lord is less than sure fingered, but the general effect remains intact...