Word: yeomens
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Bloody Mary" was the first female sovereign to perform the ancient ceremony. She did the job thoroughly, crawling the whole length of Westminster Abbey on her knees. Her half-sister, Elizabeth I, introduced a fastidious innovation. She made sure that the yeomen of the royal laundry had washed the paupers' feet thoroughly and doused them with sweet herbs against infection before she herself laid hand or lips to them. By last week, when Elizabeth II (in her first official public appearance since the funeral of her father) performed the traditional Maundy Thursday rites, the paupers' footwashing had been...
...spectacle of eight mustachioed Beefeaters singing through their mutton-chops ought to be enough to warm the cockles of anybody's heart. The Winthrop House production of Gilbert and Sullivan's "The Yeomen of the Guard" has that and more. It has principals who act and sing with gusto. It may not be the D'Oyly Carte company in the Junior Common Room, but it is a thoroughly delightful group...
...writing the book for "The Yeomen of the Guard" Gilbert was faced with the problem of appeasing Sullivan, who thought he was too good a composer to bother with light opera. As a result this tale of Bloody tower and the romances that take place in its shadow comes closer to being "grand opera" than anything else the two men wrote together. For a change, the ending is not entirely happy...
Although "The Yeomen of the Guard" has many excellent songs and scenes, it is Jack Point, the unhappy Jester, who distinguishes the work. W. Barry Pennington plays the role with as complete a mastery as anyone could hope for in such a production. He projects Gilbert's conceits admirably, and at the same time is able to make the fool a genuinely pitiable character. There is more of the grumpily clever W. S. Gilbert in Point's lines than in those of any other part in the operas...