Classic Ross Amico

Tag: Gilbert and Sullivan

After School with Arthur Sullivan

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

May 13, 2026
“The Mikado,” Racism, and a Radio Legend

As a disturbing addendum to yesterday’s post about “The Mikado,” written in honor of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s birthday: the same friend with whom I enjoyed a volley of favorite Gilbert & Sullivan YouTube videos last week wrote overnight to remind me that, in the case of Ko-Ko the Lord High Executioner’s famous “list” song – in which he catalogues those “society offenders who never would be missed” – absent from modern productions is the line, “There’s the n***** serenader and others of his race… I’ve got them on the list!”

I remember, even after the lyric had been altered, as it had been by the time of the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company recording through which I first encountered the work when I was in high school, to “the banjo serenader and others of his race,” that I found it curiously jangling. What race could possibly be meant? Sure, “The Mikado” was written in 1885, when everyone would have been familiar with minstrel shows and the songs of Stephen Foster, with all their banjo strumming, but even a hundred years later, as a teenager, I knew precisely.

Of course, we can deflect it onto the character of Ko-Ko – not everything a character says necessarily reflects the attitudes or beliefs of its author (in this case, W.S. Gilbert) – but considering everything else on the list is calculated to provoke a titter, its out-of-left-field inclusion strikes a sour note indeed.

Perhaps “others of his race” is now to be taken figuratively, as in any kind of person who might play the banjo? I think it requires some seriously gymnastic denial to contort from the original line and arrive at that conclusion.

What I find especially poignant about my friend’s note is that he alludes to his friendship with Henry Varlack, long-time radio personality at the late, lamented WFLN, for 50 years Philadelphia’s full-time classical music station.

My friend recalls, “Oddly enough…when I visited Henry Varlack… after he’d retired from even the tour business… and was approaching the end… he always sang it: ‘You know… it’s the n***** serenader and the others of his race… and the prohibitionist. I’ve got them on the list. I’ve got them on the list.’

“I was always extremely saddened by him singing these verses… but… in retrospect… I realize that he might’ve known that I was the only person in the room who understood the historical context of the lyrics, as none of the other employees had ever listened to Henry as a classical D.J.

“It still disturbs me though… that these lyrics were running through his head in the weeks before died.

“Henry lived through the height of racism.”

Of course, Varlack did not grow up in the age of W.S. Gilbert or the minstrel show, but even in the ‘50s and ’60s, there’s no doubt he saw, and likely experienced, a lot of nastiness.

It makes me sad to think of Henry, who was always a hero of mine, a disembodied friend in the middle of the night, whose distinctive voice introduced so much of the music most meaningful to me, ever having been the object of hatred or discrimination.

The funny thing is, I listened to him for years before I ever even learned that he was black. A true case of race being skin deep. In what way would it ever be acceptable to demean this man, or anyone like him?

By the way, Henry was also a baseball scout. I know I’ve written about him once or twice before. Here’s a post from 2019.

https://www.facebook.com/photo/?fbid=1142137445953544&set=a.279006378933326

Varlack died in 2006 at the age of 65. His remains were interred at St. Clement’s Church in Philadelphia. Rest his beautiful soul.

The “little list” lyric was not changed until 1948. Henry would have been 7 years-old. This is an example of why it’s so important for history not to be erased.

Here’s a 1926 recording with the original lyric:

It is possible, I suppose – and I hope it is the case – that W.S. Gilbert, with his education and razor wit, could have been railing against the figure of the Negro minstrel – a white man in blackface, twanging on the banjo – an image so prevalent in those days.

Gilbert, I so want to believe in you.

But why, then, use the word again later in the opera? In “A More Humane Mikado,” the original lyrics describe a lady given to modifying her appearance excessively (as the Mikado perceives) receiving the punishment of being “blacked like a n***** with permanent walnut juice.”

I would hope that that is a line that never would be missed. You would never hear it sung that way today. Even so, it’s important that it is remembered. These may have been cases of casual racism in the society in which they were bandied, but from our vantage in the 21st century, these things still matter.

PHOTO: Sir Henry Lytton as Ko-Ko

May 14, 2024
Happy Birthday Sir Arthur Sullivan!

All right, Savoyards, it’s Sir Arthur Sullivan’s birthday. Let’s see those “likes.”

Here’s the great John Reed. Why is this collection not on CD, in the form it was originally issued? Granted, all the numbers are drawn from complete recordings:

Seasonal Sullivan:

Sullivan without Gilbert – his “Irish Symphony” (though I still prefer Sir Charles Groves’ recording):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X9irmDpqDSs

May 13, 2017

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