The Durham Savoyards’ 2024 Gilbert and Sullivan production was THE GONDOLIERS, in which two newly-married Venetian brothers learn one of them is a foster sibling and the rightful king of Barataria — but not which one (yep, another of Gilbert’s baby-swap plotlines). Until they can figure it out, they’re stuck as co-rulers with their Venetian belief in equality warring with their new status as monarchs. Plus the rightful king has been promised in infancy to another, which means one of their marriages is invalid. But which?
(As you can see, TYG bought us really good seats. This was my birthday present).
I was puzzled what the point of the parody was so I ordered the first volume of The Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan (I have the second) to find out. It turns out Gilbert wanted to satirize British republican and anti-monarchical movements and picked 15th century venice as the setting because they shared the same view. For unknown reasons he switched to much less republican 1700s Venice; the Savoyards switched this production to 1950s Italy which I don’t think added much. However it was still a great deal of fun with the second-longest stretch of singing without dialogue in any of their shows, and very well performed. Below, my friend and fellow writer Ada Milenkovic Brown posing as Victorian audience along with participating in the chorus. “Though the present and the future belong to another, the past is ours — and nothing can take that away!”
In his Beautiful Mornin’ Ethan Mordden chronicled how Rodgers and Hammerstein rejuvenated the Broadway musical in the 1940s by treating musicals as plays with characters, plot arcs and songs tailored to specific individuals in specific settings. Their influence continued into the 1950s but the 1960s changed things up again, as Mordden details in OPEN A NEW WINDOW: The Broadway Musical in the 1960s.
Morrden argues that Camelot was the last show to follow in Rodgers and Hammerstein’s style with Cabaret several years later showing the darker, less conventional turn the musical would make going forward. Other changes were that rising costs meant even a hit show such as She Loves Me might end up in the red; director-choreographers began to take over from producers as the dominant force; and the off-Broadway musical (e.g., The Fantastiks) was a thing (as Mordden tells it, off-Broadway theaters in earlier decades dismissed musicals as too mainstream; in later decades they were big productions indistinguishable from Broadway shows). The book looks at shows including hits (Fiddler on the Roof, Hello Dolly), flops with bad scores (Mordden has nothing good to say about How Now, Dow Jones) and flops with good scores such as On a Clear Day You Can See Forever (when a critic told writer Alan Jay Lerner he liked that at intermission he had no idea what would happen in Act Two, Lerner replied “That’s the problem, neither did I.”). Worth reading if the topic interests you.
#SFWApro.
