Patience, Impatients

AS THE overture to the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players' new production begins, the lights go up on a three-tiered, pink and white stage, with the operetta's title decked across the middle in green icing-like script: "Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride." The highest tier is a small semi-circle at the rear of the stage: around the perimeter, pink columns support a placard bearing one half of a red cutout heart. It's a satisfying moment when the significance of the set suddenly becomes clear: the whole thing is like a giant wedding cake.

Just a few measures into the overture, four men in white aprons and baker's toques race onto the stage and proceed to act out an elaborate pantomime, dashing about putting last-minute touches on the concoction, attempting to restore the missing half of the red heart. The overture continues--a terrific pastiche of melodies from the score that follows--and so do the four bakers; they keep mugging at the audience, shrugging their shoulders in deep despair, and clattering into each other every step of the way. Finally, after several unsuccessful attempts at restoring the lost ventricle, leaps in the air and pratfalls off ladders, one of the bakers manages to fit the piece together. At the performance I saw, a further section of the heart broke off and fell to the ground; it was unclear whether this was accidental or intentional, but the significance--metaphysical or cardiovascular--escaped me.

Ignoring for the moment that this schtick with the bakers is so tiresome and hammed-up that even the children in the audience cringe: the scene destroys the clever suggestion of designer Ken Moya's simple wedding cake. Furthermore, the overture, given a first-rate reading under Joyce Bynum's direction, is relegated to the role of mere background music.

Ultimately, the staging of the overture illustrates director David Carmen's fundamental assumption that continually bogs down an otherwise delightful production, that if the audience isn't kept constantly amused by broad gestures and incessant slapstick, it will become bored and confused. It's an unfortunate approach to take: surely the Agassiz Theater crowd is capable of picking up the wedding-cake suggestion and content to listen to the overture undistracted. But from start to finish, this is a Patience for the impatient.

CARMEN'S staging does a disservice to some top-flight performances. As Colonel Calverley, the leader of a troop of dragoons whose fiancees have all fallen in love with the poet Bunthorne. William Propp wins over the audience from his first entrance. In one toothy grin, he can look mischievous and still hopelessly bemused, and he handles the perilous patter-song without missing a beat. Carmen's basic idea for staging this number--a list of the ingredients that go into a heavy dragoon--is original and witty: the Colonel sings it on his soldiers' shoulders, lending new meaning to the phrase "heavy dragoon."

But Carmen does not stop here: throughout the song, the dragoons bounce up and down in rhythm, grimace and moan under the Colonel's weight, and end up overwhelming Propp's noble effort. The chorus's distraction in this scene is especially regrettable because the Players have added a sensational new verse to the patter-song in which Gilbert's original recipe--including "the pluck of Lord Nelson on board of the Victory" and "the humor of Fielding (which sounds contradictory)"--is supplemented by additives like "the biceps of Ryan O'Neal" and "the eyeballs of Kermit the Frog."

In the title role. Marjorie Hellmold gives the innocent milkmaid just the right touch of flirtatiousness, and her naivete becomes appealing, not ludicrous. Unfortunately, she, too, suffers from the chorus's conspicuous horsing around. Throughout her first act solo. "I cannot tell what this 'love' may be," the ensemble of "lovesick maidens" is sneaking up on her and trying to strangle her with their tear-stained handkerchieves, only to trip over themselves as she steps out of their path. Hellmold sings sweetly and sincerely, and it is a shame that the chorus should detract from her performance.

The most puzzling examples of excessive direction are the two male leads, the "fleshly poet" Bunthorne and the "idyllic poet" Grosvenor, who inherits the train of lovesick maidens from Bunthorne in the second act. (Audiences at the first performance of "Patience," exactly one hundred years ago today, recognized these two as thinly disguised versions of Oscar Wilde and Algernon Swinburne.) It is an accepted convention in American performances of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas for the singers to imitate a British accent. The convention is not a sacrosant one: as Broadway's current production of The Pirates of Penzance with Linda Ronstadt and a street gang of pirates testifies, the operettas can withstand unconventional approaches.

Carmen observes this convention: all the performers dutifully roll their r's--all, that is, except Bunthorne and Grosvenor. As Bunthorne, Marty Fluger speaks his lines in a throaty, smart-ass tone that sounds like something between Groucho Marx and Frank Zappa--the Groucho resemblance heightens as Fluger lifts his eyebrows and flicks ashes off of an imaginary cigar. In the role of Grosvenor, Tim Reynolds, tall, tan, mustachioed, with his shirt unbuttoned to his navel, resembles nothing so much as a swinger in a single's bar. It would be the most natural thing for this Grosvenor to sidle up to Patience and ask, "Hey, good-looking, you come here often?" Instead, his pickup line is "Prithee pretty maiden, will you marry me?" Both these characterizations are consistent and not without their charm, but in an otherwise traditional production, they are jarring.

FORTUNATELY, it takes more than over-directing to take the life out of a Gilbert and Sullivan winner like Patience. Gilbert's lyrics have vet to be topped by any songwriter for sheer cleverness: in Bunthorne's confession that he is an "aesthetic sham," to name just one memorable example, he sings. "This air severe/is but a mere/veneer.... This costume chaste/is but good taste/misplaced." And Lady's Jane's second-act solo, sung by the exemplary Ethelwyn (Muff) Worden, to this day speaks to the audiences of Doctors Tarnower and Pritikin:

Stouter than I used to be,

Still more corpulent go I-

There will be too much of me

In the coming by and by!

A full-scale production of Gilbert and Sullivan is a rare commodity and a treat not to be missed, but there is too much of this Patience.