Gilbert and Sullivan

(from 2012)

In connection with another blog I write for, I often check old newspapers for information about the activities of a certain 19^th century religious writer who we shall call CTR. Not long ago while scouring pages of old Pittsburgh papers, I noticed that a touring company of Gilbert and Sullivan players were performing The Pirates of Penzance in his area. A strange vision came into my mind, of CTR walking home through the streets of old Allegheny humming to himself, I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General. It was quite incongruous.

(As an aside – and I’m afraid my posts are always going to be full of asides – you really must check out the parody of Major-General by American satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer, who sang the Periodic Table of the Elements to this tune... Available on YouTube and all good internet video sources...)

So why on earth has this all come to mind now? Probably because I am writing from Buxton in Derbyshire, U.K., at the 19^th International Gilbert and Sullivan festival, that’s why!

We visited the book shops and charity shops, and booked one coach excursion and five operas in three days – as you do when you are a glutton for punishment. You obviously have to like this stuff, because it doesn’t come cheap.

So why does G&S still survive a century after their passing? Their popularity probably rests on Gilbert’s rapid-fire lyrics, puns on words (which Brits generally love), along with humorous social comment (even if 130 years out of date at times). And it has to be admitted that Sullivan, when not being po-faced trying to write grand opera, did write some jolly tunes. Generally, the Buxton festival favors the traditional approach, and all performances are professionally videoed in a three camera set-up and you can buy them as souvenirs the day after the performance.

Mrs Occasional has taken the opportunity to “dress up” and even Occasional has been a bit tidier than usual.

Perhaps the best show so far has been performed by what is called “the youth theatre.” Strenuous efforts are being made in the UK to interest people under the age of 90 in the joys of Gilbert and Sullivan. A number of school and university groups are having a go. To appear in the Buxton “youth theatre” you had to be between 9 and 18 – and that included the orchestra! So youngsters from all over entered auditions, and just a week before they came together under professional direction to put the performance together. They performed a lesser known work called Ruddigore. For any stray readers who may know the opera it contains a patter song usually called It Really Doesn’t Matter that is A REAL STINKER! But they nailed it! Of course we bought the performance DVD the next day.

For a marked contrast to Buxton’s traditional approach, about two week ago we spearheaded a gang of people from our “congregation” (there must be a more appropriate collective noun than ‘gang’ but I can’t think of one at present) to an open air theatre production of G&S’s The Mikado - that was anything BUT traditional.

Open air theatre in Britain tends to have one special element: rain, usually torrential – where the audience is in the dry and the cast splash around emulating “the drip of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd.” But on this day we had sunshine – lots of it.

The innovative angle this time was that a second-rate concert party circa 1930 had arrived at a theatre to find it had no roof (joke number one), and also to find that, unbeknownst to them, they had been booked to perform The Mikado. A lack of appropriate costumes and a considerable amount of improvisation from a totally unsuitable cast was the order of the day.

It could have been a disaster – one of those bright ideas from someone just out of Drama School or University designed to bore or offend as many people as possible. In the event, in its own non-Buxton way, it was extremely successful. I loved it. I roared out loud. People looked quite concerned. Grumpy, world-weary Occasional doesn’t often do that.

The Mikado kept on starting an aria from the wrong opera – to be shouted down by the rest of the cast – and for his big number, The Punishment Fit the Crime, suddenly whisked out a ukulele and tried to sing his song in the style of George Formby (a particularly British phenomenon from the 30s and 40s from whom American culture has probably mercifully been spared) while the rest of the cast tried to wrest the instrument from him.

Ko-Ko was played by the company’s ventriloquist, who did a “bad-vent” routine, complete with the traditional disastrous drinking-a-glass-of-water-while-the-dummy-tries-to-speak routine for Ko-Ko’s speech when he is summoning up courage to propose to Katisha.

I suppose this amateur production had a certain resonance for a number of reasons. My father ran concert parties for most of his life – meeting at least two of his wives that way. In folk clubs I have been known to play the ukulele – badly. My paternal grandfather (who I never knew) was an amateur ventriloquist. And my maternal grandfather (who I also never knew) was a director of Gilbert and Sullivan operas for years at the Alhambra theatre in Bradford, where my maternal grandmother had been a mezzo-soprano...  They met and the rest, as they say, is history.

So, these are just some haphazard disjointed thoughts in our hotel over a pleasant glass of red wine, while Mrs Occasional is avidly glued to her e-Reader. What you might call a random catalog. As Koko in the Mikado might say:

“I have a little list...”