I recently posted about Topsy-Turvy, Mike Leigh’s wonderful film about the making of The Mikado. Watching it for the first time in a number of years reminded me of how much I love the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan–and how rare it is for them to receive first-class, fully professional productions in this country.
Earlier this summer I saw the Utah Shakespearean Festival‘s production of H.M.S. Pinafore. I was impressed by the festival, but didn’t care much for its Pinafore, which got all the things wrong that are usually gotten wrong whenever an American theater company tries its hand at Gilbert and Sullivan. As I wrote in The Wall Street Journal:
Music is often the weak link of regional companies located well away from major metropolitan areas. Such was the case with “H.M.S. Pinafore,” a Broadway-style version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta that was staged in an overly jokey way by Brad Carroll, adequately but unmemorably sung, and accompanied by an “orchestra” consisting of three synthesizers and six non-electrified instrumentalists. The results sounded predictably cheesy, and the production as a whole wasn’t strong enough to surmount its weak musical values.
One of the reasons why G & S (as they’re known to buffs) are so enduringly popular is because their works are technically simple enough to be performed by amateurs. Alas, such performances tend to be…well, amateurish. Among the many instructive things about Topsy-Turvy is the exceptionally high musical quality of the singing and orchestral playing heard on the soundtrack. Contrary to the impression left by the 1980 Kevin Kline-Linda Ronstadt Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance and the 1983 film based on it, the G & S operettas are not musical comedies avant la lettre. Yes, Arthur Sullivan had a sense of humor, but he was still a classical composer through and through, and much (if not all) of his music must be sung by classically trained vocalists in order to make its full expressive effect. It is also gorgeously orchestrated, and cries out to be played with the same elegance and euphony you’d expect to hear in a professional performance of a piece by Mendelssohn–or Mozart, for that matter.
Does this mean that Pirates, Pinafore and The Mikado are really operas in disguise? Back in the Fifties, Sir Malcolm Sargent recorded them for EMI in studio performances featuring English opera-house singers and accompanied by the Glyndebourne Festival Chorus and the Pro Arte Orchestra. (Sir Charles Mackerras did much the same thing forty years later in his G & S recordings for Telarc.) The results were fascinating and often quite lovely to hear, but lacked the stage-savvy sparkle of the very best 78-era recordings of the D’Oyly Carte Company, for which the G & S operettas were originally written.
It’s the same kind of tradeoff you typically encounter in performances of Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music, which is a brilliant but somewhat unstable cross between a Broadway musical and an operetta. As I wrote in the Journal apropos of Chicago Shakespeare’s 2003 revival of A Little Night Music:<
Even though two of the roles were originally written for non-singers (Glynis Johns and Hermione Gingold), the rest of the score places heavy demands on musically unsure performers. Not only does it sound better when sung by classically trained voices, but Jonathan Tunick’s luminous orchestrations require a fair-sized band of competent players in order to sound as good as they can.Does all this make “A Little Night Music” a bona fide opera? Not exactly. Unlike “Sweeney Todd,” it’s more a book show with extended musical scenes than an opera with spoken dialogue, and few opera singers are sufficiently secure actors to bring off the starring roles. (I’d give anything to see it done with Bryn Terfel and Anne Sofie von Otter.) New York City Opera, which revived its large-scale production of “A Little Night Music” last season, tried to split the difference by casting Jeremy Irons, Judith Stevenson, and Claire Bloom, but Mr. Irons’ near-complete inability to carry a tune proved a near-insurmountable problem, though the 44-piece orchestra, directed by Paul Gemignani, emitted properly lush sounds.
Chicago Shakespeare Theater, by contrast, has taken what might be called the off-Broadway approach. In Gary Griffin’s production, “A Little Night Music” is sung by actors, played on an all-but-bare thrust stage in a smallish house, and accompanied by a fourteen-piece orchestra. Lush it isn’t, but the gain in intimacy almost completely offsets the musical losses….
Note, however, that I said “almost.” Chicago Shakespeare’s A Little Night Music, like last year’s Broadway revival of Sweeney Todd, was a brilliant stage production, but if I’d “seen” it with my eyes closed, I doubt I would have thought nearly so much of it. In the end, the point of Sondheim’s shows is their scores. The same thing is true of the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan–and, for that matter, the operas of Mozart, Verdi, and Puccini. At the same time, though, no musical-theater work can remain alive in repertory without an effective libretto, and there are any number of operas and musicals with comparatively undistinguished scores that continue to be performed solely because they “work” on stage.
So which part of the G & S operettas is more important, the words or the music? My Solomonic answer is that the musical numbers–which are, of course, by Gilbert and Sullivan–are vastly more important than Gilbert’s facetious libretti. As for the songs themselves, I’d say that Sullivan is primarily responsible for making them memorable, but that Gilbert’s words were primarily responsible for inspiring Sullivan to write such memorable music. (Except for “Onward, Christian Soldiers” and “The Lost Chord,” he didn’t write a single piece of music without Gilbert that continues to be performed today.)
As I’ve said many times, theater is an empirical art whose practitioners make their own rules, and any critic who isn’t prepared to dump his preconceptions at a moment’s notice is in the wrong business. Nevertheless, I hope I live long enough to see a performance of The Mikado that is beautifully sung, elegantly played, and imaginatively staged–though I’ll settle for two out of three, and if necessary even one.
In the meantime, we’ll always have Topsy-Turvy.
ELSEWHERE: By far the best short book about Gilbert and Sullivan is Leslie Baily’s profusely illustrated Gilbert and Sullivan: Their Lives and Times.
To order a three-CD set containing superior transfers of the 1926 and 1936 D’Oyly Carte recordings of The Mikado, go here.