King Arthur in the Union
Today regarded as an American musical classic, Lerner and Lowe's Camelot met with a less-than-enthusiastic reception from critics when it originally opened. They dismissed the Lerner show as being inferior to My Fair Lady, its immediate predecessor by the same composer-lyricist team. The comparison irritated Lerner, who pointed out that he and Lowe had had hits before My Fair Lady, such as Brigadoon.
The comparison probably also would not sit well with Will Sakas, director of the Freshman Arts Council's production of Camelot. Sakas, who proposed the show to the Council, loves the musical for its dramatic content: the tragic love story and struggle to create a civilization in the midst of the Dark Ages, Camelot is, in his opinion, "a very beautiful, very personal tragedy."
The director read and re-read material on King Arthur and the Round Table, including The Once and Future King, which was Lerner's immediate source for the musical. As a result, Sakas will present a Camelot stressing the figure of the king in the dual guises of man and monarch. Although turning points in the show come when Arthur must choose between his desires and his ideals, Sakas believes Arthur's fate, like that of most tragic heroes is already determined at the opening of the play. Such a view reinforces the interpretation of Camelot as a musical tragedy.
Most importantly, Sakas has eliminated many of the show's spectacular scenes, including several processional marches and court scenes. These measures were partially dictated by necessity, considering the limited confines of the room in which the show plays on the Freshman Union's second floor. But the lack of extravaganza also coincides strongly with Sakas's interpretation. Marches and elaborate sets only distract from the flow of the musical and the concentration on Arthur's story, and Sakas wants no distractions in this production. "We want it to hit home to people," he says.
By contrast, spectacle abounds in Princess Ida, the spring opera offering of the Gilbert and Sullivan Players. Aside from the Hasty Pudding musical, the opera has the largest budget of any student production, and the shows usually show it. Topnotch voices are frequently displayed as well.
The plot is typical Gilbert and Sullivan--complex, nonsensical, and irrelevant. The princess of the title flees her palace to avoid marrying a prince pre-chosen for her. She establishes a school for young ladies, dedicated to the disliking of men. The school is literally shut away from male society by a wall that encloses the grounds. But the royal fiance, in search of his princess, manages to enter the school--disguised as a girl. The women's academy setting loosely ties the production into the Radcliffe centennial, reportedly one of G & S's reasons for mounting the show this year. Though one of Gilbert's and Sullivan's lesser-known operettas, many scholars consider the score one of the duo's finest.
British wit also characterizes the Dunster House production of Shaw's Heartbreak House. Though not lacking in Shavian verbal cleverness, this play is atypical Shaw in certain ways. It abounds in action, making it less talkative than Man and Superman or Saint Joan. The characters are more three-dimensional and very finely drawn; they espouse philosophies, instead of embodying them, as is so often the case with Shavian types. Often, in fact, they seem to echo characters of other plays by Shaw, only they turn out not to be what they seem. This motif runs through Heartbreak House.
Written late in Shaw's career, Heartbreak House unfolds against the backdrop of World War I. It opens almost like an Agatha Christie murder mystery: a young girl, accompanied her fiance and father, comes to a strange country house, invited by a woman she doesn't know all that well. The house is bulging with a variety of guests, to who terms like "wacky" and "zany" cannot be too strongly applied. A burglar enters the premises, as does the long-lost daughter of one of the guests. Relationships among the characters are tangled--nobody is quite what he appears to be. Eventually the knots become untangled, in revelations amusing to the audience but painful for the characters--heartbreaking, in fact.
The background of World War I--a conflict whose cataclysmic effects were very much realized by its contemporaries--has caused some critics to feel that the weird household represents the disintegrating pre-war society in microcosm. In the sense that the play portrays a group of people, suspended and enclosed while their world slips away from them, Heartbreak House resembles the works of Anton Chekov. In the play's preface, Shaw expresses the desire to write "a fantasia in the Russian manner." A mixture of mystery and melancholy, Heartbreak House could be described as something of a cross between Agatha Christie and Chekhov.
Contrary to popular belief, the Hasty Pudding stage will not remain dark now that "Overtures in Asia Minor" has closed; the theater will host the Harvard Shakespeare Theater's Romeo and Juliet this weekend and next. There's not much one can say about the world's most famous tragic love story, except that this interpretation has a great deal of "fast and furious" action, according to one cast member, and that director Valerie Lester is aiming for highly emotional heights. The production will be a fairly straightforward one--in other words, Capulet will be an Italian nobleman and not a fascist dictator; one girl, not three, will play Juliet; and Romeo will stab Tybalt with a sword, not a sausage.