Category: Daily Dispatch

It’s Arthur Sullivan’s birthday.

Just looking at these box sets of D’Oyly Carte LPs of the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas fills me with bittersweet nostalgia. I remember the smell of the boxes and recall with pleasure reading along with the enclosed libretti.

I was a G&S bug in high school. Joseph Papp’s silly, roistering, 1981 Broadway revival of “The Pirates of Penzance” launched me on my way. The musical alterations would have horrified the composer, but the performers were all game (with an uncanny Tony Azito, though singing in the wrong register as a Keystone Kops Sergeant of Police, all physical grace and genius), and the choreography fun and fleet.

It spurred me to collect a number of the other G&S favorites from my local record store, and I committed the best of them to memory. What a bizarre teenager I was, to be able to sing “Pirates” then, from first note to last. Furthermore, how screwy my best friends were, who would sometimes sit and listen with me after school.

At the same time, I was an enormous Marx Brothers fan. In the early films, Groucho often made a ludicrously grandiose entrance, heralded by chorus, and launched into a ridiculous song. It was obvious to me that the songwriters were emulating Gilbert & Sullivan. Later, Groucho would appear in a televised production of “The Mikado.”

My mother and I and occasionally a friend or a girlfriend would catch every Gilbert & Sullivan revival within reach. Muhlenberg College used to stage excellent musical theater productions in the summers, and I remember their superb, Broadway-worthy G&S with affection.

The ‘80s also brought some pretty dodgy G&S adaptations to PBS, with Peter Allen in “The Pirates of Penzance,” William Conrard in “The Mikado,” Joel Grey in “The Yeoman of the Guard,” and Vincent Price in “Ruddigore.” Some of these were frankly quite bad, to the point of embarrassment, but I still got enjoyment from watching them. Clive Revill (as “The Sorcerer”) was always first rate in anything he was in.

I once worked for a pompous bookstore owner, who was also a Savoyard, and it was all I could do to gently correct him when he misquoted Gilbert & Sullivan. He never backed down, but I was always right, which he once uncomfortably conceded. Later, I heard he went to jail for something. Ironically, I remember him once singing the refrain, “A policeman’s lot is not an ‘appy one.” I imagine a triumphant Tony Azito flailing his limbs outside his cell.

Sullivan eventually grew exasperated with the phenomenal success of his collaborations with William S. Gilbert. One always imagines creative artists who work so well together must be the best of friends. Of course, it’s not always the case.

Sullivan had a sense of his own worth, and sometimes it would be nice, he thought, if he would be recognized equally as a serious composer. It could easily be argued that he was the greatest English composer of his day, but his success with musical comedy made it hard for him to be taken seriously, just as today it’s hard for a certain, underinformed segment of the musical community to take John Williams seriously. But both composers were/are masters of their craft, who achieved much beyond the comfort zone of their greatest popular successes.

It wasn’t until the compact disc era that posterity was allowed, for the first time since the Victorian era, to take in the full extent of Sullivan’s musical endeavors. My favorite Sullivan-without-Gilbert has always been the “Irish Symphony.” I’ve heard a lot of his other music, and while well-crafted and certainly enjoyable, none of it really has the vitality and immediacy of that he wrote to Gilbert’s libretti. The alchemy between the two was so powerful, it continues to crackle. It gives you the best sense of what it must have been like to be alive at the time.

Of course, there’s also this cylinder of Sullivan speaking at a dinner party in 1888 (on which he makes some perspicacious remarks about the future of recorded music), reproduced here with 17 minutes of astonishing recordings and footage from Sullivan’s world. As someone points out in the comments section, the dinner party took place only five days after the double murders of Elizabeth Stride and Catherine Eddowes by Jack the Ripper.

Documents like these really make history come alive. People born in this era still walked the earth when I was a boy.

Happy birthday, Sir Arthur Sullivan!

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Clive Revill as “The Sorcerer”

Tony Azito in “Pirates”

Groucho Marx in “The Mikado”

Sideshow Bob does “H.M.S. Pinafore”

Stratford Festival “I am the very model of a modern Major General” (with meta reference to “Pinafore” and some fun and games with the lyrics during the encore)

“Irish Symphony”

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TOP: Caricature of Sullivan, with impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte and collaborator W.S. Gilbert