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WPCNR ON THE AISLE. Review by John F. Bailey. September 23, 2005: Gilbert & Sullivan In Brief (s) opened the White Plains Performing Arts Center crucial third season Friday evening for a one week run, (before the traditional WPPAC “small for opening night but enthusiastic” audience), featuring a troupe of talented, engaging comic singing performers working earnestly with a concept in search of a good book and an identity.
WPPAC’s Fab Four: Left to Right, John Dewar, Deborah Jean Templin, Carolann Sanita, Matt Castle. Photo by Paul Undersinger , Courtesy White Plains Performing Arts Center.
This was opening night according to the WPPAC four color 2005-2006 Brochure. Raymond Cullom, the new Managing Director of the WPPAC and the Helen Hayes Theatre Company in Nyack, welcomed the audience, saying that the WPPAC had these missions: to provide a venue for local community group performances, (he invited members of the audience to inquire), “search the world” for entertainment, and “four times a year stage our own productions and nurture new shows.” He described this evening’s show as “the first and only preview performance,” and encouraged the audience to interact with the actors.
Then the fastidious Charles Czarnecki, the Musical Director/pianist entered stage right, to begin his 90 minutes of virtuoso plunking, up-and-down-the-keyboard soaring, and pounding breathless musical contrapuntiality that chases the Gilbert & Sullivan librettos. Mr. Czarnecki took fussy exacting measurements placing his piano seat, drawing some laughs, loosening up the “I-do-not-know-what-to-expect” audience in the mood for laughter. Mr. Czarnecki could embellish this bit, and he should consider it, play the sensitive, exacting artist to the hilt.
Then I saw a clever concept that jauntily sampled 14 Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas that cannot make up its mind what it wants to be:
The actors come on to taped applause and introduce themselves.
Is it a group of actors in a throwaway gig in summerstock?
A troupe of actors doing a Gilbert & Sullivan Revue in vaudeville?
Actors doing an unwitting expose of the formula art of musical making?
Actors doing a Gilbert & Sullivan night club act kibitzing the audience?
An evening of Mr. Gilbert & Mr. Sullivan themselves reminiscing their greatest hits and how they made them?
Or about the cutthroat relationship between actors and actresses, a subplot played for laughs?
G&SIB is all of these, but like any work being “nurtured,” parts of it work better than others and should be built upon. Others discarded. When a shocker occurs after the parody of Ruddigore, the lines are said too fast for the audience to understand what just happened. At a moment in the performance that wakes you up, you don’t know what has happened. You only assume, that’s script failure or failure to enunciate the script, or an obscurity only “Gilbert & Sullivan” buffs could know.
The whole piece is done very fast and will please and amuse the Gilbert & Sullivan buff. But, you have to know the material to enjoy the satirical side of it. The clipped speed the English accents, and the rush, rush, rush burrows along like a London Underground Express with unexplained local stops.
There are some breathers, when the actors coalesce and segue to the next scene, portrayed with the vaudeville gimmick of placards. I confess I was getting uneasy towards the end. There are laughs at the antics and Marx Brothers-like running around stage, but the 90 minutes do you in. The actors cleverly synopsisize each opera giving you a crash course in G & S.
Since I do not know G & S except from high school chorus classes at
G & SIB could be a lot more than that. You have personal elements of rivalry from the actors working against what they are doing in the same script, and part of the audience, at least I did, wanted the show to explore that, younger woman older woman triangle with leading man and I wanted to know how these performer a performer dramas play out. The audience struggles for its emotional center (is there a romance here or not? then it disappears).
When Mr. Castle and Mr. Dewar assume the personas of Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan, complete with pipes and mutton chop sideburns, really droll, wonderfully comic discussing their shows, you want more of that bit – that is good writing and portraying. I thought Gilbert and Sullivan being interviewed with the modern actors in some sort of fantasy could be elaborated on – that was when the script was really working and engaging me. Writers are such interesting people, anyway, don’t you think?
The audience took to the actors right away
The show tries hard to be liked, but like every Saturday Night Live skit it is a one joke script, draws polite laughs, an occasional hoot, a few belly laughs and much appreciation for the four virtuoso voices and personalities cavorting, pushing, driving themselves madly through this marathon:
The perky little beltzy soprano, Carolann Sanita, a little Gilda Radner, a giddy Goldie Hawn, mugs in ingenue coyness and sings like Sarah Brightman in voice and demeanor. The bombastic John Belushi-like comic tenor, Matt Castle, never lets go a laugh when he can work one. The Jane Curtin type mezzo, Deborah Jean Templin, and the Tony Randallesque John Dewar neatly blended and I think were great casts by Mr. Cullom to do this Gilbert & Sullivan marathon.
Where are We?
The actors start the show, reading from cards as if they were doing a casting call. The venue is unclear. Their assignment is to do all 14 operetta by Gilbert & Sullivan and that is what they do. Matt Castle, the blonde robust tall tenor sets the comic tone with A Lovesick Boy, he also is wonderful in drag playing Buttercup complete with lipstick, and this is the most comical, entertaining mini-opera of the evening thanks to Mr. Castle’s rambunctious absurdity, he is a great soprano by the way. Mr. Castle is the comic star of the evening prancing and posturing and playing the segues with excellent timing, a Drew Carey big lovable lug.
The brunette Ms. Sanita the soprano voice fills the hall with genuinely pretty trills and high drama as befits the over-the-top Gilbert & Sullivan satire of opera that all of these mini-operas represent. Her solo in breastplate with sword as Princess Ida is her high moment in the show backed by her “Ah Ah Ah Ah” trills that reduce the other actors into submission.
Mr. Dewar’s fine moment comes as he “auditions” for the part of “The Sorceror” swirling his cape and enunciating he is “John Wellington Wells who creates spells.” G & S were the Cole Porter of their day.
Ms. Templin creates an intriguing rivalry with her soprano counterpart through the show fighting her for roles, providing good laughs. But it goes nowhere, it’s paralel without a connection.
All four actors singing He is an Englishman was very nobly done. In fact a gentleman next to your reviewer started singing along to “He’s an Englishman,” very audibly during the H.M.S. Pinafore mini-performance. (He was the only member of the audience who sang along. That has never happened to me in a theatre before.)
G&SIB packs in all-Gilbert-and-Sullivan all the time, including a synopsis of three acts of The Mikado.
By far the most interesting parts of this show are the interplay of the actors playing Gilbert and Sullivan discussing their writing formulas, which are remarkably still in use in many hit musicals of most of the last century. The formula: 4 characters, a virtuous young woman, a handsome leading man, a mother and “a patter man” providing comic relief and scene-stealing. All the actors steal scenes in this show in a most believable way.
(The program notes do not list the songs each of the actors sing, which is unforgivable from an actors’ standpoint. If I have to sing a gazillion Gilbert & Sullivan Songs, I want the critic to get my name and parts I sang right. The critic and the audience has no way of remembering who sung what there are so many songs in the show. )
With all respect to the actors, this is a celebrity show, because it is a one-trick-pony, with fourteen different saddles, which shows you that successful shows are formula. If you had
At nearly the end of the 90-minute show one of the actors says “only 6 minutes to go.” You should never write a line like that because it elicits a sigh of relief from the audience.
There is a lag then and an actor says, “we need a brutal epic” end and there is some futzing about until they get going on doing all fourteen finales from all fourteen operas, with rapid fire costume changes. A classic finale, but they have to get to it quicker, since they said there were six minutes to go. When you go to a great entertainment you do not want it to end. You always want something more, the end needs a better setup.
The audience applauded for a minute and a half. Liked it. In fact, the crowd, which numbered only 75 persons at curtain time, on opening night, despite a full-page ad in The Journal News yesterday underscore Mr. Cullom’s problem next year: the White Plains Performing Arts Center is running out of good will and support, when they do not sell out their opening night. It also points out the faux pas of not running in a blockbuster show to start the season. Gilbert & Sullivan is a genre, and the 75 persons on opening night are not a good sign.
One gets the feeling the new Managing Director needed a show for September since the original show was pulled from the schedule. The original show scheduled for September at WPPAC, Joan’s Other Kitchen, by Brian McConnachie was pulled. Helen Hayes Theatre Company got A Mother, A Daughter, and A Gun for September, a full-length play.
Mr. Cullom needed a show, so he put in his own, casting it about three weeks ago and pulling it off this evening. Cullom originally wrote and performed the G&SIB show as a review with the
Mr. Cullom cast it a month ago in
It is short for the $40 price. It runs 90 minutes straight which is a lot of G & S back to back to back. It’s an earnest clever little warm up revue, which is what it was scheduled to be at the Edinburgh Theatre Festival in Scotland in August where it was booked for a one month run of free matinees and cancelled at the last minute two days before its first performance– but an Open Night evening’s blockbuster entertainment for $35-$40 it is not.
This is WPPAC’s Artistic Director Tony Stimac’s walk year, and Saving Aimee, or Aimee, (the title not quite certain) the next production has got to come through for the theatre and start generating some community interest. It is the new Kathie Lee Gifford-created musical, and that will be followed by A Christmas Carol in December, and Phyllis Newman in Girl’s Room and a black musical called Charlie’s Place in the spring.
Gilbert & Sullivan In Brief(s) is a good show to educate young persons into the cult of Gilbert & Sullivan. But it is an acquired taste..
G & SIB is “coming along” but it is not ready for Broadway.
More book. More bones.
As Gabby sang in City of
It needs work.
It needs Gilbert & Sullivan.
Gilbert & Sullivan In Brief plays through October 2, 2005. For information on showtimes, call 1-888-977-2250, or 328-1600.
