Senseless Cheer

EVEN CONSIDERING it's Gilbert & Sullivan, almost everything about Ruddigore is ridiculous. Some of the most preposterous little touches slip by almost unnoticed--the Gilbert & Sullivan Players' excellent production gives them just the right sense of serene, oblivious seriousness--like the hint of a flute obligato at the first entrance of an almost entirely irrelevant character called Mad Margaret, or the "Alas, poor ghost" with which the hero, for no reason in particular, greets his spectral uncle.

The plot's broader outlines have to do with a witch's curse that dooms each baronet of Ruddigore to commit a crime a day, on pain of an agonizing death administered by his ancestors. They're so utterly ridiculous that Gilbert apparently lost all interest in them, tacking on a perfunctory legalistic technicality of an ending to take off the curse and bring the ancestors to life--selectively, because he didn't have enough female leads to marry them all.

Having even less hint of a purpose than most of Gilbert's plots makes Ruddigore not just more consistent but consistently funnier and better humored (since Gilbert generally mistook seriousness for irritability) than it would be otherwise. And it lets almost everything in the Agassiz production work well, from Peter Kellogg's direction of the presumably mousy chorus of professional bridesmaids as though they were so many mice to a somewhat shabby-looking first-act set whose slightly bedraggled ocean seems cheerfully appropriate to everything else.

Sullivan's music come through even more beautifully than Gilbert's words. Gerald Moshell evokes a full, singing tone from his fine orchestra, as is only proper, since Ruddigore has more than its share of set-apart showpieces--Thomas D. Fuller's hornpipe in the first act, the respectable caper Edith Marshall as a reformed Mad Margaret dances with Pell Osborn as a reformed wicked baronet in the second, the astonishing materialization of the Ruddigore ancestors, led by David Buchner, from their picture gallery--as well as a first-act finale that includes one madrigal, with lyrics about how nice the seasons are, that's one of the lovliest things Sullivan ever wrote.

Fuller's resounding tenor voice, and the startling facility with which he simultaneously seems cheerfully villainous and cheerfully solid--the salt of the earth, with which even the least courageous of British imperialists could hope to manage to rule the waves--make him an ideal antihero: he'd stand out even more if the rest of the cast, right down to the chorus, weren't so fine. Joshua J. Zimmerberg wheezes through his old retainer's role in high style. Kerry McCarthy is as good, as Rose Maybud, the soprano. And Douglas H. Hunt, as Fuller's foster-brother, trying to avoid his Ruddigorish fate without needing to die early, is just remarkable--perfectly solemn and apparently joyfully in on the joke at the same time. The whole production is like that--and it's certainly a joke worth being in on.