Venetian Treat

THE PASSING of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company last fall was the occasion for just as much gloating as mourning. A vocal contingent of inveterate Gilbert and Sullivan scorners saw the company's demise as a fitting end for the world's leading enforcer of dramatic stagnation. Thousands of deserving new plays are written each year, they grumbled happily--how preposterous it was to sink in so much money to produce the same few operettas over and over again.

For those of us who were weaned on traditional Gilbert and Sullivan--who wore thin the D'Oyly Carte records as children and faithfully attended all the local and high-school productions--this sentiment was not only irritating--it was difficult to countervail. In the face of ever-harder times for new playwrights and non-commercial theaters, how could we justify our inordinate fondness for the costly iron-clad stagings of ten Victorian crowd-pleasers. What could we say to defend our cherished tradition and its domination of artistic resources that would not make us sound like David Stockman?

Alice Brown has gone and made life even tougher for Gilbert and Sullivan traditionalists in her astonishing production of The Gondoliers at the Agassiz Theater. Brown has approached Gilbert and Sullivan's last great collaborative effort completely from scratch, as if she had never seen or heard about its traditional staging. No director of Gilbert and Sullivan, to this longtime fan's recollection, has ever quite ignored the D'Oyly Carte orthodoxy the way Brown has. Wilford Leach, in his successful Broadway production of The Pirates of Penzance updated G & S conventions in many ways and even overthrew them at times, but there was never a moment when he wasn't aware of all the Pirates that preceded him.

But Brown and the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players approach The Gondoliers as if it were written yesterday. And--disconcertingly to the devotee of tradition--the result is extraordinary: certainly the most compelling and imaginative production the Harvard Players have offered in recent memory, and one of the most fascinating evenings of theater a decade of G & S-watching has turned up.

BROWN'S UNDERLYING INNOVATION is simple but endlessly affecting: She has treated Gilbert's characters as complex, believable, human beings--not the wit-spouting, blissed-out caricatures that have appealed to audiences for more than a century. The female chorus that sings the opening number--a song about their collective love for two gondoliers--is not the usual band of cheerful automotons: they are genuinely smitten, languishing distractedly about the stage and staring into the air. When the inevitable pairing off of male and female choruses takes place, it is no hand-holding affair--they behave the way we all know young couples in love behave in public.

This emotional modernization is mirrored by an updating in the play's setting. Refreshingly. Brown has shunned an aggressive Peter Sellars-brand recasting of the entire operetts--the gondoliers who become kings are not Haitian boat-people, and the local duke, duchess and grand inquisitor are not the Trilateral Commission.

But the women do wear simple, modern clothing--a lovely assortment of pink and blue blouses and skirts. And the male chorus sports smart 1980s army jackets and leather sneakers, and paddles in and out riding blue skateboards. When the gondoliers leave Venice to become kings of Barataria, they puff themselves up a bit with hats and golf-clubs. Most amusing of all, when Don Alhambra, the normally buffoonish grand inquisitor, finds himself in moments of stress, he takes a snort from a small black snuff box he carries; the box occasionally tips over when someone bumps into the Don, and the powder that spills out is unmistakeably white.

THERE IS AN appealingly child-like simplicity to Brown's staging of Gondoliers. Soloists step to the front of the stage, sing their piece and step back. In the large dance numbers that fill the stage, the cast generally pairs off and engages in minimal movements to the rhythm of the music: clapping hands, doing a little tango, skipping in a circle.

Yet for all its spareness, the operetta rarely lags. For one, Brown has spruced-up the longer songs with clever shticks at one side of them: language-lab subtitles for a scene sung in Italian and a caricature-in-process to accompany a song about feminine perfection. For another, it's never tiresome just to stare at Martha Eddison's stylish costumes; they have a funky, continental allure rarely seen outside the pages of a fashion magazine and a few tables in the Adams House dining hall.

Finally, the cast boasts a handful of exceptional performers. Though so many performers are drawn from outside the College--long-standing, misguided G & S Players practice--the strongest and most professional performance in the operetta comes from a freshman: Nan Hughes as Tessa, one of the gondoliers' brides. Hughes is a natural actress, and her commanding, sensuous mezzosoprano is the vocal equivalent of chocolate-chocolate chip ice-cream. Margery Hellmold's performance as Casilda is further proof that first-rate singers enroll at Harvard: her soprano has a rare purity and vigor but never becomes inappropriately operatic.

In the end, seeing this Gondoliers is enough to give a traditionalist pause. It is difficult not to walk out of the Agassiz wondering how the other nine operettas would fare with a similar fresh treatment and realizingsheepishly that the old chestnut stagings may finally have seen their day. Perhaps the D'Oyly Carte is better off dead if productions like this rise up to takes its place.