Word: mikados
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Gareth Jones brings a pleasant tenor to the straight role of the half-mortal Strephon, and Kenneth Sandford, who has been with the troupe for more than two decades, is a sturdy Private Willis (he will be giving something close to his 2100th performance as Pooh-Bah in The Mikado here...
RUDDIGORE, or The Witch's Curse seemed cursed when it premiered in 1887. A vital piece of stage equipment malfunctioned; genteel members of the audience found the title vulgar, objecting to the offensive adjective "bloody;" lower class viewers demanded the revival of The Mikado, which had closed three days earlier. Despite extensive revisions, Ruddigore acquired a reputation for failure, artistically and financially. It was known as "the unlucky opera"--but Harvard is lucky to have it, thanks to a particularly fine Gilbert and Sullivan Players production...
...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...
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...