Patience

THE AUDIENCE STILL STANDS for "God Save the Queen," and they send her victorious, happy and glorious before every performance, but things have changed at the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. Agassiz is no longer packed for opening night and even with the customary G&S ringers in the audience the shouts of "Encore" sound weak More's the pity, because Patience is the big success G&S has needed for these many years.

Everything works in Patience. The singing, the acting, the dancing (Oh, the dancing!), the orchestra everything David Gayhng, the musical director, and Ray Huesay, the stage director have put together one of the tightest brightest and most well played musical productions at Harvard in quite a while.

Patience does not lend itself easily to greatness. The social satire of Gilbert and Sullivan fades with every passing year, like a tintype of some long forgotten grandparent. The comedy of manners that is Patience with its mild jabs at the military and the intellectual alike seems pale and watered-down today. The genius of G&S, when it appears in the show is only a shadow of the inspiration of Mikado or lolanthe Gaylin and Huessy have exploited every possible moment of great theater in the show and forced Patience to be memorable.

Jeffrey Wayne Davies as Bunthorne the mock aesthete who prides himself on the flock of women who adore him creates a dark but wispy Edgar Allan Poe type a creature of irreproachable vanity and matchless hypocrisy. His mastery of the stage the music the orchestra and the audience during the famous "Bunthorne's Song." ("What an extraordinarily deep young man....") has to be seen to be believed He so far outshines anyone who has hit the boards in G&S in recent years including himself in other roles that any attempt to describe him would collapse into superlatives.

Ellen McLain's Patience the native, young loveless girl who finds true love and happiness etc., etc., is properly native and young. She steals the show more than once with her singing, her stage presence and her low musical pun in the first act Nancy Urqhart Traverse as Jane, the lovelorn lass who is by her own admission, "massive," gives a superior performance, especially in her elephantine pas de deux in the second act with Bunthorne.

Bob Locke, who poses the musical paradox: Instead of rushing eagerly to cherish us and foster us. They all prefer this melancholy literary man," picks up in the second act a presence he lacked in the first, and leads his zany band of pseudo-Dostoevskis. Paul Scharfman and Douglas Hunt, on their futile quest for literary prowess, dressed one and all in outfits inspired by Poe out of Oscar Wilde to rival the literary out-of-itness of Bunthorne and his "perfect" rival, Archibald Grosvenor (Marc Jablon). They all emerge, in Gilbert's words, "perfectly utter."

Patience, like incest or the mad uncle locked in the attic, is the type of thing everyone has heard about but very few experience. It is usually passed over for the better known works of Gilbert and Sullivan, for it lacks the fire of Feydeau or the mirth of Moliere. Nonetheless, done well, it is an entertainment worthy of note, and at Agassiz, it is being done as well as it can be.