Word: yeomens
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...YEOMEN OF THE GUARD is a Gilbert and Sullivan curveball. It skips along in familiar G & S style: the mistaken identities, the thwarted romances, the brutally clever patter, all set to a jolly, stirring score. Yet throughout the operetta there runs an uncharacteristic current of grandeur and sobriety--just when the final scene seems to be resolving itself with happy Gilbertian expedience, the leading character staggers onto the stage and dies a prolonged, hideous death...
...Sullivan Players have undertaken an ambitious project, for the usual pitfalls of light Gilbert and Sullivan comedy--convoluted dialogue, supersonic lyrics, labyrinthine crowd scenes--are compounded by the anomalous need for simple pathos. They have overcome the dual difficulties of this operetta in a cautious, straightforward production of Yeomen that is both delightful and moving...
...sturdy core of talented principals proves Yeomen's most valuable asset. Foremost among them is a new face: freshman Erica Zabusky. As Phoebe Meryll, who pines for the condemned Colonel Fairfax while fighting off the advances of his repulsive jailer Wilfred Shadbolt, Zabusky steals every scene she plays. She admirably avoids a problem that bogs down several of the other players: she is at ease and unselfconscious with Gilbert's archaic ods-bodkins-laced dialogue that so easily calls clumsy attention to itself. Her pure, clear mezzo-soprano enchants and, although her flirting with Colonel Fairfax gets her nowhere with...
...ROMANTIC LEADS, usually serve as mere straight-men for the comic characters. But in Yeomen Phoebe, Fairfax, and Elsie all play three-dimensional, pivotal roles, especially in this production, because both comic principals are weak. Willis Emmons turns the razor-sharp, dominating role of Jack Point into a confusingly puckish, giggly supporting player. Some of the blame falls to director Paul R. O'Neill, who evidently has encouraged Emmons to read much of his dialogue in a jarring falsetto. In addition, Martha Weiner's Act One costume for Point bares too much resemblance to the costumes for the chorus...
...midst of the noisy bash of the jazz age, the writers deplore the decline of "manners, conversation, hospitality, sympathy, family life, romantic love." While Yankee highbrows like E.E. Cummings and Edmund Wilson were discovering the seven lively arts, the Agrarians were frowning on movies and imploring the yeomen of Tennessee to switch off their Atwater Kent radios, take down that country fiddle from the wall and scrape out an Elizabethan air. Their best poet, John Crowe Ransom, magically evoked a land where larks' tongues are never stilled, "sunlight lies like pale spread straw" and ladies of "beauty and high...