This was a 3 show weekend, but I only had to review two of them. The third was this afternoon. We went to San Francisco for the 50th annual fund-raising gala. The Lamplighters is 62 years old and in its 15th year, they were having money problems and decided to put on a special show for which they would charge more money and serve champagne. For the first year or two, a winery donated all the champagne, but I guess that we drank too much and they have bought it ever since.
I have fond memories of ushering at that first Gala (where a fire broke out backstage which delayed the start of the production) and after the show was over, standing in the theater getting snockered with leading tenor Adrian McNamara.
Tonight they asked from the stage how many people had been coming for 10, 20, 30, 40 and 50 years. Only 5 of us in the audience had been coming for 50 years (though we skipped a few years during our baby-raising days).
Tonight also honored Bill Neil, who has been performing with the Lamplighters for 50 years (and was in tonight's show). He received a proclamation from San Francisco's mayor, Ed Lee, congratulating him on his record.
In the earliest galas, and for many years, the shows consisted of songs from the current season used to fit some sort of silly plot. There were no lyric changes, just the songs out of context to move along a new story line. Things changed in about 1982 when then-office manager David Witmer and I convinced musical director Gilbert Russak to base the new show on soap operas and to use the entire Gilbert & Sullivan canon and change some of the lyrics to fit the silly plot. Gilbert, certain that would be too much for the chorus, fought us on it, but eventually he agreed to try it. The three of us wrote the show and Major General Hospital was a phenomenal success and though when viewed today, the show can't hold a candle to the work that is being done now, it got rave reviews from critics who had not seen anything like it before.
Gilbert and I wrote the show the next year, under a lot of adverse conditions, and by the third year, we had begun to assemble a small writing committee, foremost among whom was Barbara Heroux, who would go on to become general director years later, and Geoff Colton, patter man and lyric writer extraordinaire. The year before he died, Gilbert wrote his magnum opus, a Gilbert & Sullivan salute to Wagner's Ring Cycle.
After Gilbert's death, we worried about how the show would get done, but so many talented people stepped up, with Barbara and Geoff in the lead. I stuck around for 2 or 3 more years, but learned that you really have to be there to effectively participate in all the silliness that are gala writing committee meetings. The galas now are head and shoulders above Major General Hospital and the writers. led by an extremely talented guy named Mike Dedarian with 13 other writers far more talented than Gilbert and I were in those early days.
Tonight's offering was Return of the Deadeye or The Farce Awakens" and was based, very loosely, on the first Star Wars movie, with characters like Luke Moonwalker, Princess Ida Organa, Obi-Bun Thornobi, Juan Solo, and Poohbacca. The actress who played the 3-CPO character (GCPO) was in gold costume with gold paint on her exposed body parts. she had the movements of 3-CPO down pat, while the actress playing R2-D2 (Mark-O) was riding on some sort of ...gosh, I don't even know what it was. It was like a hoverboard, controlled by her feet. She explained to me that each half of whatever it was she was standing on had a motor and she could activate each independent of each other. She did it so seamlessly that it seemed all one piece of her costume.
The songs were wonderful (I particularly liked one about the current drought called "I once was a very hygienic person") and easily understood thanks to supertitles (and a book of lyrics you could buy to read later)
It was another winner. During intermission there was an auction which raised about $15,000 for the company. I met the auctioneer before the show and found out he lived in Davis. When we started playing the "what part of town do you live in?" game we discovered that we live just a block apart.
The champagne reception was upstairs at Herbst Theater and when my knees gave out, I found a chair to sit in. I loved just sitting there watching all these people who had paid nearly $100 a ticket for this event and thinking back to its beginnings and its history through the years. I wish Gilbert could have seen it.
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