Everyone who has ever written a Broadway musical owes their fame and fortune to that dynamic British duo, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. From fin de siécle Austro-Hungarian caprices from Franz Lehar and the Czech-infused operettas from Rudolf Friml, through the brassy Gershwin brothers, the silky elegance of Cole Porter,...
Everyone who has ever written a Broadway musical owes their fame and fortune to that dynamic British duo, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan. FromAustro-Hungarian caprices from Franz Lehar and the Czech-infused operettas from Rudolf Friml, through the brassy Gershwin brothers, the silky elegance of Cole Porter, the Americana of Irving Berlin, the sinuous pastiche from Kander and Ebb, the utter uniqueness of Stephen Sondheim and Lin-Manuel Miranda...name any of them...
Sullivan wanted to be a serious composer – he was a serious composer – and throughout his career he continually dismissed his work in the musical theater as beneath him. Although renown for “Onward Christian Soldiers,” “The Lost Chord,” a grand operaH.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado, Yeomen of the Guards, Patienceplaying only through next weekend at the Hobby Center by the acclaimed Gilbert & Sullivan Society of Houston. This misplaced fame galled him.
Of course, Dennis Arrowsmith, as Major General, has the hardest job of all. He has to sail through the patter song of all patter songs, “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General,” a tongue-twister unlike any other. Gilbert outdid himself and any other librettist with this beauty – a perpetual mobile of unending rhymes and convulsive phrases that circumnavigate through arcane ancient references. He maneuvered magnificently, all while in the character of fatuous, ineffectual army leader.
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