show review: The Rose of Persia
Oct. 6th, 2008 08:49 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacLyric Theatre of San Jose, at the Montgomery Theater: last weekend and next
This 1899 production was, by all accounts, the most successful operetta penned by Sir Arthur Sullivan subsequent to his collaborations with W.S. Gilbert. The libretto and lyrics are by one Captain Basil Hood, who did his darndest to serve up a Gilbertian pastiche. There's a lot of the stock characters - the insipid young lovers, the befuddled comic baritone, the Duchess of Plaza-Toro, the Mikado - well, they acted just like them - and a complex plot in which confusions and mistaken identities pile up into a situation where you can't possibly worry about the impending execution of most of the characters, because this is a comic opera so everything's got to come out all right in the end. Hardly a spoiler alert: it does.
So as a Gilbertian pastiche it passably amuses, and is very much a rewind to before the time of The Yeomen of the Guard, in which the impending execution had been damn well serious. Musically too, though it's Sullivan's last completed work, it's a rewind. The G&S numbers which emerged in association in my mind were all very early ones, from The Sorcerer or Trial by Jury. It's perhaps slightly more Persian (or at least vaguely Middle Eastern - if you're a stay-at-home Englishman in the plenitude of imperial power, Persia and Arabia are pretty much all the same, really) than The Mikado is Japanese.
The songs are of very mixed quality. Dramatically the second act is superior to the first, but the best run of music is near the end of the first act. The cleverest number there was a "House that Jack built"-style build-on fast patter-song for the Mikado - I'm sorry, the Sultan - and his evil minions to introduce themselves with. But by far the best music in the whole work was an ensemble piece near the end of the second act, as the characters try to come up with a happy story that will please the Sultan and induce him to issue stays of execution. But all they can think of are various English nursery rhymes, of all the unlikely things, which they cast in tragic tone and sing of in mournful elaboration ("And the dog of that person named Hubbard / Accompanied her to the cupboard") to a passably good tune. It tickled me enough to make the visit worthwhile, though I find a web review of various recordings that calls this a boring song that would be better omitted. So it's very much a matter of taste, isn't it?
Besides not being that great a show, The Rose of Persia is a complex production with a large cast and little opportunity for doubling. And the fact that the plot turns on a hallucinatory drug probably doesn't encourage companies to put it on these days, either. So Lyric Theatre deserves credit for taking the trouble, especially as G&S audiences are notorious conservatives who only want to see the same half-dozen favorites over and over again. The Sunday matinee was nearly deserted, but the show went on. Much of the acting was good (Michael Cuddy as the Sultan, Jim Martin as his executioner, and Mark Blattel as the befuddled protagonist were the most outstanding), the costumes were really impressive, and the sets representing solid stone buildings only wobbled slightly when the characters sat on them. If you're around here and care for musical theater at all, pop in next weekend and give them a cheer, will you?
This 1899 production was, by all accounts, the most successful operetta penned by Sir Arthur Sullivan subsequent to his collaborations with W.S. Gilbert. The libretto and lyrics are by one Captain Basil Hood, who did his darndest to serve up a Gilbertian pastiche. There's a lot of the stock characters - the insipid young lovers, the befuddled comic baritone, the Duchess of Plaza-Toro, the Mikado - well, they acted just like them - and a complex plot in which confusions and mistaken identities pile up into a situation where you can't possibly worry about the impending execution of most of the characters, because this is a comic opera so everything's got to come out all right in the end. Hardly a spoiler alert: it does.
So as a Gilbertian pastiche it passably amuses, and is very much a rewind to before the time of The Yeomen of the Guard, in which the impending execution had been damn well serious. Musically too, though it's Sullivan's last completed work, it's a rewind. The G&S numbers which emerged in association in my mind were all very early ones, from The Sorcerer or Trial by Jury. It's perhaps slightly more Persian (or at least vaguely Middle Eastern - if you're a stay-at-home Englishman in the plenitude of imperial power, Persia and Arabia are pretty much all the same, really) than The Mikado is Japanese.
The songs are of very mixed quality. Dramatically the second act is superior to the first, but the best run of music is near the end of the first act. The cleverest number there was a "House that Jack built"-style build-on fast patter-song for the Mikado - I'm sorry, the Sultan - and his evil minions to introduce themselves with. But by far the best music in the whole work was an ensemble piece near the end of the second act, as the characters try to come up with a happy story that will please the Sultan and induce him to issue stays of execution. But all they can think of are various English nursery rhymes, of all the unlikely things, which they cast in tragic tone and sing of in mournful elaboration ("And the dog of that person named Hubbard / Accompanied her to the cupboard") to a passably good tune. It tickled me enough to make the visit worthwhile, though I find a web review of various recordings that calls this a boring song that would be better omitted. So it's very much a matter of taste, isn't it?
Besides not being that great a show, The Rose of Persia is a complex production with a large cast and little opportunity for doubling. And the fact that the plot turns on a hallucinatory drug probably doesn't encourage companies to put it on these days, either. So Lyric Theatre deserves credit for taking the trouble, especially as G&S audiences are notorious conservatives who only want to see the same half-dozen favorites over and over again. The Sunday matinee was nearly deserted, but the show went on. Much of the acting was good (Michael Cuddy as the Sultan, Jim Martin as his executioner, and Mark Blattel as the befuddled protagonist were the most outstanding), the costumes were really impressive, and the sets representing solid stone buildings only wobbled slightly when the characters sat on them. If you're around here and care for musical theater at all, pop in next weekend and give them a cheer, will you?
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no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 12:00 am (UTC)I agree they really outdid themselves on the costumes. It's worth going to the show just for the hats.
no subject
Date: 2008-10-07 12:03 am (UTC)