Re: Topsy-Turvy's Treatment of The Mikado

On Apr 8, 8:49 am, Eagle <eaglenewsgr...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
> On Apr 8, 8:37 am, David Lawver <la...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
> wrote:
>
> > Gilbert belonged to a small group of dramatists who reacted against
the
> > undisciplined melodramatic mess of the earlier Victorian theatre...
>
> It's a plan of mine in my old age to finally get around to reading
> Gilbert's non-musical plays, of which he wrote dozens.

Really excellent: "Engaged" which is occasionally revived (people
often try to set it to music with Sullivan tunes) -- quite ruthless
and VERY funny. (Clearly Oscar Wilde knew it well.)
Good but too preposterous to stage today: "Foggerty's Fairy."
(No one remembers fairy dramas or commedia dell'arte in the Anglophone
world, so parodies of such things won't work.)
"Rosencrantz and Guildenstern" -- Rosencrantz and Ophelia are in love
and desperate to get rid of Hamlet -- they succeed! It turns out
Claudius is a frustrated playwright and they find a suppressed verse
tragedy of his.....

Those are the best.
There are also the verse tragedies ("Pygmalion and Galatea") and
comedies ("The Palace of Truth") and a couple of operettas with other
composers ("The Mountebanks.")

The really serious verse tragedies ("The Isle of Broken Hearts") will
explain to you more clearly than anything else why the post-Victorians
were so desperate to get away from their Victorian past. That so
cynical a wit as Gilbert could come up with such tripe and believe it
good is very painful.

Jean Coeur de Lapin