Word: sullivans
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Edward Ball drives along Sullivan's Island, a spit of beach across the bay from Charleston, S.C., savoring his childhood. There is the clapboard house where he lived until he was 12. Here is the elementary school. "Had my first dance with a girl there," he says. The reverie ends when Ball walks to the end of a pier where the sulfur smell of marsh grass rises, as rank as the tale he unspools. An estimated 40% of American slaves arrived first at this spot. Confused, terrified, usually sick, they spent two weeks quarantined in "pest houses" or onboard ship...
Today there is no marker, no mention of any of this on Sullivan's Island--just beach homes and speedboats bobbing in the sun. "The reason people are afraid to talk about slavery is the terrible truth of someplace like this," says Ball. He learned of the pest houses while writing Slaves in the Family (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $30), his chronicle of his slave-owning family and the blacks they held. "Look at this," he sighs. "The story has absolutely been erased...
...standouts come from several of the purely comedic roles. Jason R. Mills '99 delivers the show's most delightful comic performance as Pooh-Bah, the state advisor who has taken upon himself all of Titipu's offices except that of executioner. Managing to make one of Gilbert and Sullivan's most enduring and well-known characters unusually likable, Mills retains the character's indispensable stuffiness: "I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmic primordial atomic globule," Pooh-Bah sniffs genially, as he explains his haughtiness to Nanki-Poo and the audience. "Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable...
...Nanki-Poo, is played with both delicious villainy and a surprisingly subtle range of emotions by Tuesday Rupp. Bloodthirsty and terrified of her own encroaching old age, Katisha first appears in a cloud of smoke and an attitude that brings to mind Cruella de Ville. But, playing Gilbert and Sullivan's somewhat enigmatic character to the hilt, Rupp injects a disturbing and note of tragedy into the entire latter half of the play; in the complex weave of The Mikado, this cast of darkness works surprisingly well, lending the play an unusual depth and richness of texture...
...this "updating" cleverly defuses the touchiest issue inherent in The Mikado: Gilbert and Sullivan's mythicized Japan is based in large part on condescending and underinformed Victorian colonialist views of the Far East--and, while nobody really wants to point the finger of accusation at the most beloved of English musical comedians, the fact is that the authors' presentation of other nations and peoples were often less than politically correct. (After all, some of the original lyrics to "I've Got a Little List" would make modern audiences' ears burn). Contemporary productions of the play often transfer the setting...