Doing Our Best to Make Things Jolly

My fifth year at the Gilbert & Sullivan festival I was cast as Florian in Savoynet’s production of Princess Ida. I had been in Ida once before, in Houston, where I played Synthius while understudying both Florian and Gama.

I had worked with Diana Burleigh, our director, once before, in Iolanthe in 2005. I therefore knew enough to be excited at the chance to work with her again, in a more significant capacity: Diana is both pleasant and fun to work with, and extremely competent. She had an interesting concept for this production: we restored some of Tennyson’s prologue from ‘The Princess’ (the original source material for Ida) and made a pre-overture prologue in which a family party gave way to a fun game of make-believe, in which we acted out the story of Ida. I thought this was a particularly apt choice, in that it made the romance of Hilarion and Ida (Walter, Jr. and Lilian) more sensible and sensitive, and also blunted some of the jarring apparent sexism in the original.

The principle cast, I thought, was outstanding. It was:

• Leon Berger, Hildebrand
• Peter Büchi, Hilarion
• Christopher Diffey, Cyril
• Jonathan Ichikawa, Florian
• Sam Silvers, Gama
• Tony Smith, Arac
• Stuart Pinel, Guron
• Stephen Hill, Scynthius
• Jane Brendler Büchi, Ida
• Julie May, Blanche
• Vikki Willoughby, Psyche
• Christine St. Pierre, Melissa
• Meriel Bartlett, Sacharissa
• Mary Finn, Chloe
• Carol Davis, Ada

Leon, Peter, and Christopher, in particular, were delightful and exciting to work with. They all had a tremendous amount of experience and talent. Much of Florian’s business, if you know Ida, is with Hilarion and Cyril, so I was working closely with those two excellent tenors quite a lot. Here are our two trios:

• Gently, gently
• I am a maiden

One interesting performing insight I got from so much trio work is that it’s particularly important to plan carefully, and to watch one another — more so with trios than with other configurations. Typically, when you’re performing, some movements are explicitly planned and directed, and others are improvised or spontaneous, or at least self-generated. If you have a whole chorus, certain moves are all together, and other decisions, like what direction to look, or how to hold your hands, are made at an individual level. Likewise with a solo or a duet. But with a trio, the spontaneous bits must be handled with care: for if two of the three make the same decision, the third looks like he’s doing it wrong. It’s like ‘Set’ — you want them all different or all the same.Here are some pictures from this production on facebook:

• Act I
• Act II (1)
• Act II (2)
• Act III

This was my fourth year at the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival. I had been cast as Dick Deadeye in the Savoynet production of Pinafore — a surprising and exciting choice for me. I had gone into the auditions thinking that I’d make a likely Boatswain, with only a pretty outside chance of Captain Corcoron or Sir Joseph. I put in a Deadeye audition with a ‘just in case’ attitude; one time in a hundred, you apply for something you’re pretty sure you won’t get, and then end up with it by some crazy chance.  This was that time for me.  It’s more of a character role, with no arias, but there are a couple of pretty cool bits of singing.  I came to Buxton excited and curious about it.

It took me a while to settle into the role.  The director gave principals a considerable extent of free reign over character decisions, and it took me several days to figure out what Deadeye is thinking about, what’s important to him, how he moves, how he interacts with the other crew, etc. (Several days is a long time in Buxton-time; we’re rehearsing eight-hour days, and we only have eight of them; we show up off-book and piece the show together very quickly.  So when I say I took several days to get into Deadeye, I mean I didn’t do so until a couple of days before closing night, which is also opening night.) My Deadeye was a bit of an unusual one; more misfit than threatening. I’m younger than the usual DD, and average-sized — I usually think of Deadeye as being a large man, although not everyone I’ve spoken to agrees.

I decided to make him less threatening and nasty, and more awkward and outcast. I think this helps to bring out some of the humor in the role — it emphasizes how arbitrarily his shipmates shun him and his ideas. I think that Dick Deadeye is one of Gilbert’s more interesting ideas — in all three of his Act I dialogues, he listens to a conversation, then jumps in to agree with what’s already been said — but of course it sounds so much more shocking from him that everybody shuns him along with the idea.  Here’s the purest distillation of it:

Boatswain:  Ah, my poor lad, you’ve climbed too high: our worthy captain’s child won’t have nothin’ to say to a poor chap like you.  Will she, lads?
All: No, no.
Deadeye: No, no, captains’ daughters don’t marry foremast hands.
All (recoiling from him):  Shame! shame!
Boatswain: Dick Deadeye, them sentiments o’ yourn are a disgrace to our common natur’.

It’s a really neat idea, but I think Gilbert may have been too subtle with it.  Certainly, he did not develop it as much as he might’ve. One might say the same of my performance.

Most of the role sits a little low for me, vocally, but I managed ok. His ensemble work is surprisingly high.

There are some pictures of the production here and here.

My friend Carol Davis, whom I know through Savoynet, invited me to sing in a concert she organized with LOONY — Light Opera of New York.  This represented two big firsts for me: my first professional singing gig, and my first public performance of an opera aria.  In the first half of the concert, we did a number of arias and duets from operas and operettas; I sang Count Almaviva’s aria, “Hai gia vinta la causa”, from Le Nozze di Figaro.  In the second half of the concert, we did a minimally staged Trial by Jury, in which I sang the Counsel.  The concert was at the Yale Club and was therefore a semi-swanky affair.  We wore black tie.  I knew I had that tux for some reason.
I performed with a number of really wonderful singers, including several familiar faces from NYGASP in Angela Smith, Louis Dall’Ava, and Stephen Quint.  I’ve seen each of these performers multiple times from the audience; how exciting to share a stage with them!

The Trial cast was:

• Stephen Quint, Judge
• Joanne Lessner, Plaintiff
• Peter Buchi, Defendant
• Jonathan Ichikawa, Counsel
• Louis Dall’Ava, Usher
• Jane Buchi, First Bridesmaid
• Eric Peterson, Foreman

The music director and accompanist was Steve Vasta.

Everything went smoothly, and I believe that everyone had a great time.  I know I did!  This was the sort of event that makes me sit up and say, “I wish I did things like this more often!”

The New York Gilbert & Sullivan Society has a concert at each of its monthly meetings; in February 2007, I participated in my third Society concert, Haddon Hall. This is a late Sullivan work, with a libretto by Sydney Grundy. Here is the G&S archive page. This was my first experience with it; it is really a rather charming piece, with some very nice and interesting music, and some pretty nice sentimental bits. It’s not particularly funny — and it feels not much like G&S, although Sullivan is still recognizable.

The cast for this group was excellent. It was:

DOROTHY VERNON - Katie Holler
LADY VERNON- Megan Friar
DORCAS - Irma Obal Lucca
NANCE - Frances Yasprica

JOHN MANNERS - David Root
OSWALD - Paul Sigrist
RUPERT - Jonathan Ichikawa
SIR GEORGE VERNON - Richard Holmes
McCRANKIE - Philip Sternenberg

Megan, Richard, David, and Paul are professionals; I’d seen David’s Fairfax and Paul’s Physician with NYGASP the previous month (both excellent). And Richard has been on my short list of performing heros since I first saw his Captain Corcoron in Buxton in 2004. So it was an honor (and an intimidation!) to be singing with these fine people.

In the end, I felt that things came together reasonably well. The chorus bits were the weakest, because they are hardest to coordinate on minimal rehearsal. But I think that we got the piece across reasonably well. Richard says that Haddon Hall is more opera than operetta; I’m inclined to agree. One of my favorite moments of the evening was his duet with Megan, “Alone, alone!…Bride of my youth”. It was really beautiful and touching.

My character, Rupert, was something of an odd one, but I really enjoyed it. Some of his music suited me pretty well, I think — I will save his first patter song for the inevitable G&S audition that wants something that isn’t G&S.

Here are the excellent program notes, provided by our expert pianist and co-organizer (with M.D. Dan Kravitz):

HADDON HALL is a manor house located near Bakewell in Derbyshire, England in the Peak District, about 14 miles from Buxton. The house sits on a rock outcropping and is privy to gorgeous vistas. Portions of it date back to the 12th Century, but more date to the Tudor period. The house stood vacant for nearly 200 years, from the 1700s until the 1920s, and thus escaped the destructive remodeling many other older structures endured in the 18th and 19th centuries; it is one of the finest extant examples of medieval and Tudor construction. It was carefully restored in the 20th Century. Haddon Hall belongs to the Manners family; the current holder is Edward, Duke of Rutland. (At the time of the opera, the hereditary rank was Earl of Rutland.) [There was also a picture of the house on the cover.]

THE OPERA is based on a real incident, the elopement of Dorothy Vernon, actually the second daughter of Sir George and Lady Vernon, then the owners of Haddon Hall, with John Manners, in 1563. (Several architectural features of the house bear her name, most notably the door through which she left when she eloped.) In constructing the libretto, Grundy took considerable liberties with history, such as inventing a dead son for the Vernons and leaving Dorothy as their only child, but most notably moving the action forward in time by a century so that he could include the Puritans and Roundheads of that era for broad comedic effect and utilize the restoration of the monarchy to help resolve his plot. By this time in theatrical history (1892), light operas were vying for audience with the emergent musical comedy genre that would come to dominate the 20th Century stage, and there was quite a bit of cross-pollination. The inclusion of the completely extraneous comedic Scottish character, McCrankie, is an example of this. Various ethnic types would be a low-comedy feature of musical theatre as well as vaudeville and music hall until the middle of the 20th Century and the advent of modern “PC” thinking.

SULLIVAN CHRONOLOGY:

Produced in 1892, Haddon Hall was written after The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), The Gondoliers (1889), and the infamous Carpet Quarrel that divided G&S, but before they reunited—“or more or less, but rather less than more”—for Utopia Limited (1893) and The Grand Duke (1896). Sullivan’s one grand opera, Ivanhoe, had been produced the previous year (1891). Three of the other major “SWOGs” (Sullivans-without-Gilbert) were still in the future: The Beauty Stone (1898), The Rose of Persia (1899), and The Emerald Isle (1901). While some of the individual pieces in Haddon Hall bear a strong resemblance to Sullivan’s parlour songs, overall the music is typical of the later period of Sullivan’s writing, rich in chromaticism and more complex in construction than his works of the late 1870s and early to mid-1880s. Piano accompaniment cannot do this score true justice, as Sullivan was at the height of his powers as an evocative orchestrator and quite a bit of the power and beauty of the score are lost in the translation to piano, especially the storm effects. The recording by Prince Consort, available from The Sir Arthur Sullivan Society, is recommended for the full flavor.

–ASR

I gave a small recital for some of my family while I was visiting for Christmas this year; most of them haven’t really heard me sing before.  My best friend, who is also the best musician who is my friend, played piano, and I sang:

• “The good old days,” from Damn Yankees
• “If I can’t love her,” from Beauty and the Beast
• “Hai gia vinta la causa,” from Le Nozze di Figaro
• “O vin,” from Hamlet
• “I’m dreaming of a white Christmas”

It was nice, and a lot of fun.  People said nice things.

« Previous entries