This article first appeared in the St. Louis Beacon, May 26, 2013: Why should we be so surprised and so filled with wonder when, year after year, we deliver ourselves to Webster Groves and submit ourselves to the devices of Opera Theatre of St. Louis and find ourselves swaddled in the miraculous?
Is it because some organizations and individuals, pushing the age of 40, get flabby around the middle and become complacent, and in case of artistic industry, offer crowd pleasing certainties in the hope of maintaining the elusive status quo?
Perhaps that is the case with some organizations swamped in miasmas of aesthetic conservatism, but that is not Opera Theatre.
Once in the opera house, once the houselights have gone down, and the maestro has reached the podium and waved his musicians into action, Opera Theatre audiences have been catapulted time and again into places so special only poets can describe them adequately. Memories made there are lodged in our psyches thanks to this company’s wizards’ work, memories forever cherished and re-imagined, memories mined for new understandings of whom we are, why we are, where we have been and where we are going.
Art performs these wonders. And memory making and the sustaining of these memories are, I believe, particular qualities of opera, perhaps because it is the most syncretic of the arts. In operas, the visual and the musical and the physical and material come together to create illusions and to speak certain ideas about that illusive thing called truth. It is a special, very costly, very grand and thoroughly resilient medium that, while threatened by forces of all sort from the genuinely philistine to pure economics has stood its ground since 1598.
Opera’s noble attributes are part of the heritage of and help to form the foundations of Opera Theatre of St. Louis.
St. Louis got its first jolt of all that in 1976 when a heavily papered house sat still, then stood up cheering for the wonder of what Richard Gaddes et al had wrought in Opera Theatre’s very first show, “Don Pasquale.”
Youthful and exceptional
Such is the case, believe it or not, with the company’s dusted-with-gold production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Pirates of Penzance.”
The audience is greeted by a set that defines good cheer and sophistication. It rises from the colorful parquetry of the floor to its proscenium arch picked out by white lights. Once the curtain is opened – and yes there IS a curtain -- the bad-boy nautical outlaws construct their pirate ship before our very eyes, and with its completion the fun begins, when the bevy of ladies, all daughters of the redoubtable Major General Stanley, appear on the scene, ready to break the bounds society has placed upon them.
The cast is fresh, youthful and exceptional, musically and dramatically. As a commentator who reflects on these shows rather than criticizes them, I’ll stay away from separating out individuals for special attention, except for one, who is, as far as the St. Louis Beacon is concerned, is a special case.
In 2010, a young, baritone living in Chicago was asked to join the cast of “H.M.S. Pinafore” in an unusual benefit production presented by the Beacon. For a number of reasons, which may in fact resemble a subplot of a G and S show, we decided musical theater was one way we might raise some money and have some fun. That we did.
In our concert version of the show, we brought to the Sheldon Concert Hall not only Chicago baritone Hugh Russell, but also Opera Theatre’s general director Timothy O’Leary in the role of Ralph, and St. Louis Symphony Orchestra conductor David Robertson as Captain Corcoran and superstar soprano Christine Brewer as Josephine, and Richard Gaddes as narrator. It was quite a show, if I say so myself.
Russell, undaunted by all this musical fire-power and glamour, poured his theatrical and musical talents into the role of Sir Joseph Porter K.C.B. magnificently. In fact, he established himself as a virtuoso of the side-splittingly funny and extraordinarily difficult figures of pomposity and class foolishness in the Gilbert and Sullivan canon.
And so, this Saturday Russell, in his red slippers, danced across the stage and became Major General Stanley, the very model of a modern major general. He must, among other things, tell lies, and race from allegretto to allegro through such lines as
“I know our mythic history, King Arthur's and Sir Caradoc's;
I answer hard acrostics; I've a pretty taste for paradox,
I quote in elegiacsall the crimes of Heliogabalus,
In conicsI can floor peculiarities parabolous;
I can tell undoubted Raphaelsfrom Gerard Dowsand Zoffanies,
I know the croaking chorus from The Frogsof Aristophanes!
Then I can hum a fugueof which I've heard the music's din afore,
And whistle all the airsfrom that infernal nonsense “Pinafore.”
Russell’s performance, and those of his colleagues, gave the opening night audience fresh new memories to cherish, memories gleaned from a show that has, interestingly, a special American provenance.
An American claim
“Pirates” was given its premiere not in London but in New York City on New Year’s Eve, 1879. It hove into view in America because the collaborators hoped to establish their exclusive claim upon it.
Although their pursuit of copyright exclusivity wasn’t successful – “Pirates” was pirated all over the place – America can lay some claim to the show as ours: While it was conceived in London its birth was most certainly accomplished in New York.
The occasionally tense and fractious artistic marriage of its parents, W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan, was nurtured and mediated by the pair’s producer, the British talent agent, Richard D’Oyly Carte. With D’Oyly Carte’s persistence and patience, Gilbert & Sullivan’s 14 shows have brought the world joy and rapture, and rapture and joy, for close to 150 years now, assuming you’re not basing your tally on leap years, a calculation that has enormous impact on the young lovers over whom the Jolly Roger flutters so ominously in “Pirates.”
Only rarely has a Gilbert and Sullivan opera made its way into the main season at Opera Theatre of St. Louis, as the company brought the town of Titipu or "The Mikado" here in 2007. The reason, I suspect, was a response to the silly notion shared by many in the opera-going public that these operas don’t quite measure up in the seriousness department, that with a second name such as “Etta” they must remain singled out as second class members of the repertory, if not pariahs. This all sounds so Gilbert and Sullivan-esque, doesn’t it?
In any event, in the early 1980s, with the hope of changing that perception, Opera Theatre’s founding general director Richard Gaddes created a winter season around Gilbert and Sullivan. In successive years, fully staged holiday productions of “H.M.S. Pinafore,” “Pirates,” “The Mikado,” and an extraordinary “Gondoliers,” were realized at the Edison Theatre at Washington University. (There was also a production of “Die Fledermaus” at the American Theatre downtown.)
All good fun and all quite good
These Gilbert and Sullivan productions, and the Johann Strauss bonbon, were very much representative of the Opera Theatre aesthetic formula – shows that sparkled with bright young singers plus a few seasoned professionals to round things out.
In 1981, for the inaugural “Pinafore,” a young British conductor named Nicholas McGegan took the podium to conduct what was a very spare little instrumental ensemble.
The maestro looked extraordinarily youthful, and was dressed as if he’d stepped off the Sgt. Pepper record cover. But then he began to make magic with his baton, and brought forth an entirely creditable sound from his tiny band of musicians, and in the process established himself as an important musical presence in St. Louis and now, of course, around the world.
It was all good fun, and with the late Colin Graham directing the productions, it was all quite good, period -- because these operas are more than just fun. They are indeed riotously funny, but don’t let anyone tell you the music is second rate or that the stories are sophomoric. The former is challenging, intricate and very, very beautiful; the stories, while hilarious and in a sense formulaic, are examples of comedy at its most searing, a carefully crafted medium that reveals human frailty and provides rock solid wisdom about the quicksilvery nature of perception and reality.
Take a look at these stanzas from a duet that “round and pink and rosy” and entirely sinister Little Buttercup sings with Captain Corcoran in “Pinafore”:
Things are seldom what they seem, Skim milk masquerades as cream; Highlows pass as patent leathers; Jackdaws strut in peacock's feathers.
And later:
Black sheep dwell in every fold; All that glitters is not gold; Storks turn out to be but logs; Bulls are but inflated frogs.
You get the picture; it is one is painted time and again in these operas, operas that sought to puncture the pretentions and pomposities of upper middle class life in Britain in the late 19th and early 20th century, to expose the masquerades.
Beneath the facade
Although I’ve not read it, historian Jane Ridley’s new book, “Bertie: A Life of Edward VII,” opens wide a window into all of this. Ridley apparently eradicates thoroughly the notion that Queen Victoria’s life was lived to mourn the death of her consort, Prince Albert.
“Victoria, the tiny ‘widow of Windsor’ seemed a pathetic, grief-stricken figure,” a BBC review of Ridley’s book said. “The truth was very different. Though Victoria was invisible, her need to control her children was almost pathological. She set up a network of spies and informers who reported back to her on her children's doings.
“When Bertie (as King Edward was called by his family) married the Danish princess Alexandra, Victoria instructed the doctor to report back on every detail of her health, including her menstrual cycle.”
Gilbert had all this more or less figured out – or figured out well enough to weave threads of fool’s gold through his librettos so cunningly that he was able to pulverize a powerful and wide swath of British upper middle class society in the age of Victoria and of her son and heir, Edward VII. Sir Arthur, by style and title a part of all this, provided the musical vehicle for the satirical substance. The result is compelling art, art whose lessons remain relevant today, art presenting for us considerably more to chew on than funny stories and hummable music.
In the process of presenting Gilbert and Sullivan, Opera Theatre – with its penchant for experimentation with the new and its delight in freshly re-imagined revivals of the tried and true – maintains its own individuality and relevance. Year after year it brings us happily back to our seats, fully anticipating evenings full of the fresh or the new or both – and being exalted and astonished, over and over, to be recipients of exactly that.
And now, on to the company’s “Champion”-ship season.