On Apr 8, 8:52 pm, atsarisb...@[EMAIL PROTECTED]
wrote:
> 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
P.S. My favorite line from Foggerty's Fairy: the heroine, an heiress,
upends the double standard -- she will only marry a man who has never
loved before. "To me a man who has loved before is like a used postage
stamp -- of interest to the collector, but to all others a thing of no
worth."
Also: Malvina: I'm generally considered a splendid ruin.
Foggerty: You are! A sprig or two of ivy and you'd be complete.
From "Rosencrantz" Ophelia: He must be mad! Though we live in Denmark
in the year 1062, he dresses as if at the court of James I. (i.e.
1603)
In "The Mountebanks," the heroine admits she doesn't think herself
attractive, but is in a hopeless minority on the question. (Shaw loved
that.)
J C de L
|
