Just Like the Old Days

First of all, let me say a big thank you to  Mary Zelle, who frequently comments on Airy Persiflage, for writing to me yesterday morning to let me know that there were Judy Garland movies on TCM.  Turns out it was  Garland marathon, starting with The Clock, which I saw the end of at about 9 a.m., all the way through to Judgement at Nuremberg, which ended at 1 a.m.  With one exception (an Andy Hardy movie) for which we switched over to The History of Comedy, I just sat here with my feet up and wallowed in Judy Garland.  Oddly enough, even A Star is Born, a movie I have seen surely more than 100 times, somehow was like seeing it through new eyes, since I had not watched the whole thing, start to finish, in a long time.  A very good day.  Thanks, Mary!

Walt and I had a great time on Friday night.  We went to view a production of The Gondoliers (Gilbert & Sullivan) at Light Opera Theater of Sacramento (LOTS).  Gondoliers is not one of my favorite G&S operettas, though I like them all, so why was this evening so special?

The theater where LOTS performs is a place where I like to sit in the back row, but there are a lot of stairs to climb to get into the theater, so we chose the "accessible" entrance, which brought us in at the first row, between the orchestra and the audience.

The theater itself reminds me a lot of Presentation Theater, where The Lamplighters performed for all the years I was an active part of the company.  It was a school theater, but one of the best theaters of its size in San Francisco and perfect for the LLs.  

There  was no orchestra pit, but the orchestra was just kind of jammed together at the stage with  a bit of walking space for the audience to get by.  They decided that the two seats behind Gilbert, the conductor, had such limited view of the stage that they never sold them, so whenever I went to the show I sat there, so often that seat became known as "The Bev Seat" (after Gilbert died, they decided to sell them, so the Bev Seat was no more).

The set-up at LOTS is the same, but the musicians put the cases for their instruments on the first row, so I couldn't sit in the Bev Seat, but we chose to sit in the first row, but on the side.  

This put us in the clarinet section of the orchestra, which meant we didn't always get the full blend of the orchestra sound, but instead the clarinet parts overshadowed, which was just great since it gave us a feeling of what it must be like to be Jeri, who would be playing that part if she were there.  It also gave us the chance to hear the clarinet lines, which were often in harmony with the melody that we knew so well.

I was fascinated by the music stand for the two clarinettists.  They seem to have been the only musicians in the orchestra, that I could see, who had them.  They were computerized stands, where it was like the music was on a program and to change the page, they stepped on the pedals on the floor.  An easy no-hands approach! (I don't know what they do if there is a sudden power outage!)

It was a new way to enjoy a familiar show.

I was reviewing it for the Sacramento paper, which limits me to 250 words, but I was so excited about the show, I convinced my editor here to let me review for Davis too, since there was a lot more I wanted to say than I could in 200 words.  Permission came this morning and I look forward to writing it.

It was an excellent production, with great voices, good orchestra, and even a pregnant chorus woman (for real, not for theatrical purposes!).  I don't know why, but the whole experience took me back to Presentation and the shows we saw in the 70s, while the LLs were very good, but had not quite achieved the professionalism that they have now. 

Walt was feeling the same way, apparently, and we talked excitedly all the way home about how much fun it was to see this production, and remembering similar shows in San Francisco 30+ years ago.

My Lamplighter years were very special, and still are very special and so this ability to step back in time, a little, was a lot of fun.

We have another G&S show next week, after not seeing any G&S in awhile.  Next week we are going to Pirates of Penzance, this time by The Lamplighters.

History in a Nutshell

Yesterday was my book store volunteer day.  I chose to read a real light-weight book, "Girl Cook."  It was a real chick book which I chose because its cover promised to give a glimpse into the kitchens of New York restaurants.  It did that, perhaps in more detail than the average diner wants to know, but the basic story was pretty slim and predictable -- the story of a 28 year old's search for meaningful employment in a misogynistic world and a man in her life.  How many thousands of books are written about that?

It was something like 225 pages long and I polished it off with an hour to spare.  I was going to give up and read the book I'm currently reading on my Kindle, despite my self-imposed principles about not reading an electronic book while working in a real book store.  But it was raining and we had very few customers and..who was going to see me? And who, but me, cared about my principles anyway?

I got out the kindle but then I happened to glance up to one of the top display shelves in the store and saw this book:

Now I need another "complete Gilbert & Sullvan" book the way I need another Judy Garland book.  But those are the two subjects that most draw me when I see them.  This is a big plush book which traces the history of theater in England along with the development and the stories behind the G&S operettas and...hey...it was only $8.  Such a deal!

So I bought it, paying my weekly dues for the privilege of working at Logos Books (there have been very few weeks when I did not buy at least one book!).

Last night, as we were watching Dancing with the Stars--the results show (the right person was voted off first...I predict there will be no little house on the DWTS prairie at next week's elimination), I started just thumbing through the book during commercials and discovered that toward the end there is an eight page chronological table of the most important events in the history of Gilbert and Sullivan, in the Arts, and in the World from 1836 (when W.S. Gilbert was born) to 1913 (when Helen Carte, the wife of Richard d'Oyly Carte died).  It was such a weird list of things that I had to share it here.  I'm just posting what the writers of this book think are the most important world events in various years--I won't use all the years.  There are usually 4-5 entries for each year; I'm just choosing the most interesting.

1836	Battle of the Alamo
1837	Queen Victoria comes to the throne Beginnings of Economic Depression Euston Station opens in London
1839	General growth of railroad Rugby rules devised
1840	Victoria & Albert married First postage stamps Afternoon tea made fashionable by Duchess of Bedford Hypnosis discovered
1843	Typewriter invented Appearance of the first Christmas cards
1846	Invention of ice cream
1848	Revolutions in Paris, Vienna, Prague, Rome Waterloo station opens
1849	California Gold Rush Bowler hat invented Harrods founded
1850	Last salmon caught in Thames--too polluted afterwards Tea overtakes coffee in popularity
1854	First distillation of petrol Vatican ruling of papal infallibility
1858	Lecture on survival of the fittest by Darwin and Wallace Bernadette of Lourdes has her vision Big Ben opened by Queen First refrigerator invented
1860	Garibaldi uprising in Italy First pasturization of milk
1862	Abolition of slavery Britain runs out of cotton due to American Civil War Cotton and crop famine in Britain Cross & Blackwell introduce canned soups
1864	Charing Cross station opens First fish and chips shops opened
1866	Invention of Dynamite Cook's tours begin
1872	First motion picture invented First chewing gum invented
1874	End of fist Gladstone ministry Lawn tennis patented
1876	Queen Victoria made Empress of India Invention of "Lily the Pink's" compound for "women's ills" Player piano invented
1877	Women allowed to practice medicine First telephones sold First Wimbledon tennis matches
1880	First newspaper photos First successful shipment of frozen Australian beef to England
1881	Venetian gondola outmoded by vaporetto Death of Disrali
1882	Street lighting by electricity begins First psychoanalysis experiments Married Women's Property Act passed
1883	Invention of the machine gun First Buffalo Bill Wild West Show
1886	Gold rush to the Transvaal Coca-Cola is sold as headache remedy
1888	Jack the Ripper murders Invention of Esperanto
1891	Amazingly there were NO world events of note during this year!
1899	Boer War begins aspirin and sticking plaster invented
1906	The word "allergy" is coined San Francisco earthquake
1907	Hoover vacuum cleaner invented

I dont know if that was as interesting to you as it was to me, but I hope you enjoyed it.

Arrgh

I spent the day with pirates...and it's not even "Talk Like a Pirate Day."

With my computer back and all set up again, I have been ploughing through letters that need to be answered. Boy...start a little hobby like letter writing and it's amazing how quickly you get overloaded when you can't write for a few days!!!

Anyway, one pen pal is a guy named Lucas, who is fairly new to pen palling, and who contacted me from the address posted my Pen Pal Project blog. We are in the "getting to know you" period, but when I told him about being a theater critic, he gave me his theater background, which involves touring with Riverdance for a year and then going into a show called The Pirate Queen, which was headed for Broadway, but apparently ran out of steam (and money) in Rochester. Lucas was going to be an understudy.

I was intrigued with the show for two reason, first because I was wondering about all the special effects he talked about and second because, well, with a name like Pirate Queen I wondered if this was Gilbert & Sullivanesque, something historical, or a gay musical. It turns out to be something historical, about the real-life legendary Irish chieftan, Grace O'Malley. Reading through the musical's web site made me want to know more about her, but a brief check didn't yield much in the way of books that sounded interesting on Amazon (which is just as well, since I have too many books waiting right now anyway).

But I did pull up the show on iTunes and listened to enough of the music that I was intrigued and downloaded the whole album.

This musical was from the people who brought you Les Miserables and also the people who brought you Riverdance and there certainly would be no guesswork involved with that! We played part of the score on our way to Sacramento this afternoon and not only is it unmistakably by the people who wrote Les Mis, but even the voices of the performers have the same distinct sound to them. There is the Jean Valjean character (who is the heroine's father), and the heroine who sounds like a grown-up Cosette and there is even a "Master of the House" number with a guy who sounds for all the world like the actor who played M. Thernardier on the original recording.

Shortly before we reached our destination, the music shifted and suddenly there was a Riverdance-like dance number.

Overall, I am liking it, but have only heard about 1/3 of it so far.

Our destination for the afternoon was a LOTS (Light Opera Theater of Sacramento) production of Pirates of Penzance. This show is running two week ends in Sacramento and a week end in Davis and I figured if I could catch it in Sacramento, the review would make a nice bit of promotion for the Davis shows.

Though this company was begun by someone who performed with the Davis Comic Opera company many, many years and left to start his own company (which is now celebrating its 31st year), I had only attended one production. I guess in the early years there was such competition between LOTS and DCOC that it felt somehow a slight to DCOC to cross the causeway and see a LOTS production.

But a couple of years ago, the daughter of some friends at The Lamplighters was playing Katisha in a LOTS production of The Mikado and I went to see her. I thought her performance (even though she was too young for the role) was one of the stronger performances and had some negative things I felt about the overall production. I probably thought the tempos were too slow (after nearly 50 years of Lamplighters productions, I usually think all other companies have tempos too slow...I even challenged film director Mike Leigh about the tempos in his movie, Topsy Turvy, but he very imperiously informed me that they were "absolutely, completely accurate."

Anyway, I hoped that this LOTS Pirates was going to be a good production.

The theater is in a neighborhood in Sacramento in a building which may have been a school at one time. When we were parking, I saw a lot of people in pirate garb walking into the theatre, which seemed very odd, but I thought that maybe the facility was so small that they had to come to the show in their costumes (what a silly thing for me to assume! The very thought of that would give costumers heart attacks!) but, no, it turns out that about 1/4 of the audience had come in pirate costumes to get into the spirit of the thing.

Aargh.

As for the actual Pirates on stage, I was blown away. For one thing, the orchestra may be one of the best community theater orchestras I have heard in this area. Definitely professional level (though I can't figure out why the musical director cut 2½ minutes from the start of the overture, and have written to ask him to give me his thought process before I write the review).

The cast was uniformly excellent. There were a couple who could have had more volume, but man when that first male chorus started singing it was electric, and the women were as good or better. "Hail Poetry" sent chills down my spine. The leads were great, especially the woman who played Mabel, and the young woman in the small role of Edith was the kind of actor you just can't take your eye off. The group should do Oklahoma. She would be the perfect AdoAnnie.

Kelly Daniells as Edith

So the matinee did not disappoint and I look forward to writing the review. I love writing reviews when I am totally and completely familiar with the work...and especially when I actually like the production!

In Lieu of an Entry

I got all wrapped up in a book today (Michael Connelly's "Chasing the Dime") and didn't do anything but sit and read until I'd finished it.

So this seems as good a time as any to do another etagere shelf. Or shelves this time, since I'm choosing a few of the small shelves, which are easy (and short!) to describe.

This is actually our "Chieko shelf." Chieko was an exchange student who came from Japan for 3 weeks around Christmas time in 1981, and then came back the next 3 Christmases. She always sent something if she wasn't going to be here. Going through putting away stuff today, I discovered, what I had forgotten, that there is a whole set of small dishes that match that big dish behind the doll, but they are in a cupboard. And I just love the little figurines on the right side. I don't think the one in front is supposed to represent Santa, but I always put him in front at Christmas because he looks like Santa.

The Lamplighters once participated in an International Gilbert & Sullivan festival in Buxton, England. We went along (and took my mother). These were souvenirs that I picked up on the trip -- the souvenir plate, and cups with the pictures of (left to right): Arthur Sullivan, Willliam S. Gilbert, and Richard D'Oyly Carte, the guy who kept them from killing each other during their long collaboration.

It seems logical, then, to move on to "The Gilbert Shelf."

This shelf isn't entirely dedicated to my friend Gilbert. The two cups were 2 other cups I picked up in Buxton, one with a figure of KoKo from The Mikado and one of Jack Point in Yeomen of the Guard, the two roles for which Gilbert was best known. I don't remember why I have the martini glasses or the seashell, but the clay figure on the left was something that Paul made at the Art Center, here in town, when he went to visit the teacher of the ceramics class. She fired it for him and he was supposed to paint it, but he died before he could do it.

The fan in the back was a fan that Gilbert used during a production of The Mikado. It is really starting to fall apart now.

The Monkey is a little statue that I gave to Gilbert...I think (though I'm not sure) after the first show we wrote together, Major General Hospital, was such a success.

As for the batons, the wooden one in front, on that little raised platform, was said to have been used by Arthur Sullivan once. You can see where a plaque had once been mounted in the front. Someone gave it to Gilbert as a gift one time and I took it after he died. The white baton in back was Gilbert's own baton, which was used to conduct the orchestra at Gilbert's memorial service, and then given to me by Alan Harvey, who was the conductor for that service.

And finally a kinda-sorta second Gilbert shelf.

In 1915, after the opening of the Panama Canal, San Francisco held a huge world's fair, the Panama Pacific Exposition, which I believe lasted for a year. They filled in a lot of San Francisco Bay and built a lot of huge buildings for various expositions. One of the buildings which was the most beloved was the Palace of Fine Arts which, because everyone loved it so much, was allowed to remain standing after the other fair buildings were demolished and the land used to build houses on. But after more than 50 years, the building, which had only been planned to last a year, was falling apart and a wealthy philanthropist (are there "poor philanthropists"?) paid to have the thing rebuilt. They took the building down to the ground and built it up again, trying to match as carefully as possible, the original building.

The Panama Pacific Exposition had been one of Gilbert's passions and when they were tearing the old building apart, he picked up a couple of chunks of it in the rubble. The piece standing up is from the face of one of the figures standing at the top. I'm not sure where the other piece came from. He also had the stereopticon viewer and a bunch of slides from the fair. I chose to put the slide with the picture of the Palace of Fine Arts in it.

The Palace of Fine Arts in all its restored glory

As for the gavel in the middle, that has nothing to do with either Gilbert or the Fair, it belonged to my godmother's brother, who was some relative of my father's family--a cousin or something. He was Assistant Deputy Attorney of San Francisco, but died before I was born, so I never met him. However, the gavel was presented to him by Lodge #3 of the San Francisco Elks Club. I don't know the date. I guess that came from my father's stuff after he died.

The Review

I want to write a review, which is odd because the nice thing about last night was that I was going to a show that I didn't have to review. But I guess the nice thing about being a reviewer is that you get to say what you think and somebody listens...and if you have nobody to say it to, it's no fun.

So I'll review the show. It was The Mikado, which you'd think I would not be eager to see because I've seen it a bazillion times and because there is no KoKo like Gilbert, so why bother? (In fact, I sent a text message to Walt about how I didn't like the KoKo in this production and he said he hadn't expected me to. I hope I am a bit more fair than that.)

I went alone. Walt and I had planned to go together, but the night before last he had a call from his sister that their mother had been taken to the hospital. This was around 11 p.m. She had a fever of 104 and Alice Nan was calling from the Emergency Room. At 2:30, he got the call that they had admitted her to the critical care unit.

The next morning was the flurry of activity, trying to get things organized here so he could leave to fly down there. His brother got on the road at 8 a.m. and was driving down. We had tickets for Mikado last night and for a fund raising show on Sunday. I contacted someone to ask if she wanted to join me for Mikado, but she couldn't. I thought of a couple of other people to call, but then I thought of the alternative, having the alone time in the car to listen to my audio book and decided I'd just go alone.

The production was by L.O.T.S. (Light Opera Theatre Sacramento), which has been around for several years, but which we have never attended. When the company formed it kind of took audience away from the Davis Comic Opera Co., which was still operating at the time. I don't know all the politics involved, but I was never really interested in going there anyway. If I wanted G&S, my druthers were to get it from The Lamplighters.

But the Katisha in this production was being played by Susanna Peeples, daughter of the now-musical director of The Lamplighters and the one-time lead soprano for The Lamplighters. I remember the night Susanna was born, when her father, Baker, was in the orchestra pit for whatever was the current show while mother, Ellen Kerrigan, was in labor at the hospital and how Baker high-tailed it out of the theatre as soon as the curtain came down so he could be there for the birth of his daughter. (I think that was Susanna's birth...it might have been her brother's.)

We didn't really know Susanna at all until she asked us if she could ride with us to a Lamplighters event in SF and I've kind of felt a bit of camaraderie with her ever since. And of course she's a Facebook friend.

Because this isn't a real review, I'm going to leave out names other than Susanna's. Also because I'm too lazy to get up and go get the program.

I don't like driving on the freeway at night, even with my new clear vision and there was a point at which I wished I had just given up and not gone at all, but I mushed on and found the theatre all right. It's a nice venue with comfortable seats and general seating so I could find a place where my knee would be happy and where the people in front of me wouldn't feel they were going to catch the plague from my coughing (which is significantly better, BTW, but still sounds horrible if you haven't heard it before).

My first impression was that the orchestra was surprisingly good. Professionally good. That was a very pleasant thing to discover since so often little theatres in this area who rely on volunteer orchestras leave a lot to be desired and sometimes contain the "wince factor." But this orchestra was going to be good...and the tempos, which sometimes can be funereal, were sprightly and I knew that if Gilbert was watching somewhere in the celestial highlands he wold have approved.

Aside: I once interviewed Mike Leigh, director of "Topsy Turvy," the movie about Gilbert and Sullivan, about the slow tempos in the movie, which all of us in the Lamplighters who had seen a special screening had complained about. He glared at me and barked that they were 100% accurate.

The second thing that impressed me was that with a chorus of only 6 men, they filled the theatre with sound. So often I've seen G&S shows done with small choruses and there is so much lacking, but these guys sang with such volume and confidence that you didn't miss a full chorus.

The same held true for the women, which was augmented, at least in the early part of Act 1, by Susanna, dressed as a young Japanese woman, not the old Japanese woman she would become by the end of the act.

Pish Tush (also the co-director) was quite good. Pooh Bah was OK, but not outstanding.

Things were going well until KoKo came on. Now, as I've said earlier in this piece, KoKo is my favorite character and it's very difficult to beat Gilbert's KoKo, but I have seen other KoKos who have been fine. This guy was awful. And I suspect it was more a problem of direction than of ability, because he seemed comfortable on stage and had a nice voice (even Gilbert didn't have a "nice voice.") It also didn't help that he looked like the entertainment editor of the Enterprise with what appeared to be a bunch of unruly black curls on top of his head. Curls on a Japanese man? It was a terrible costuming choice! (He looked better in the publicity photos, when he didn't have anything weird on his head)

The Mikado was OK, but there was nothing "terrifying" about him. He was just a tall, thin man with funny stuff painted on his face. He should have been larger than life (which is possible to do even if you are very short, as we all learned when John Gilkerson played the role for the Lamplighters!)

The girls were fine. Both YumYum and PittiSing managed to wring a lot of humor from their lines, which was very good.

The main problem was in the directing overall. While it looked fine, there was no oomph to it. So many jokes just died because all of the delivery (by most of the actors) was at the same level. No pause for dramatic effect, or to milk a laugh.

When Nanki Poo, the "second trombone" in love with Yum Yum tells KoKo that they only way out of their difficulties is if he (KoKo) convinces Katisha to marry him. KoKo responds "have you seen her? She's simply appalling." It is a line which should be imbued with disgust and horror at the prospect, but KoKo said it as if he were asking if Nanki Poo would like a cup of tea. It received no laugh.

One of the biggest laughs can be Koko's "Shrink not from me, Katisha" when he's reluctantly trying to woo her and she whirls on him and knocks him down, then towers over him. The delivery of that line was completely lost and didn't so much as elicit a titter.

There's also another complaint I have about modern productions of "The Mikado" -- most of them. The show was written with a rather large contralto in mind and it includes a line, during a recitation by Katisha of her physical attributes: "As for my circulation, it is the largest in the world!" This works fine for a zaftig woman, but most women who play the role are normal sized and so it always sort of falls flat. The only woman I ever saw who could REALLY pull off that line was the Lamplighters' early contralto, June Wilkins, whose circulation may, indeed, have been one of the largest in the world. But Susanna's lack of avoirdupois is not a fault with this production.

It wasn't a bad show. In fact, it was quite a good show. It just seemed that it could have been such a better show if there had been better direction.

As for Susanna, she was very good. Perhaps too young for the role, but I think she carried it well and her voice, while uneven, was also very good. I wonder how the child of a soprano and a tenor can be a contralto....