Search - Gilbert & Sullivan - Iolanthe / Forrester, Donkin, Stratford Festival on DVD

Life's a pudding full of plums / Here's a production that be

L. E. Cantrell | Vancouver, British Columbia Canada | 06/15/2006

(1 out of 5 stars)

"Every Stratford production of Gilbert and Sullivan appeared to be in a race to hit rock bottom with a thud. They all succeeded. "Oh, horror!" cries the British House of Peers in this comic opera and, for once, with good reason.



With the exception of the Maureen Forrester, it is clear that singing was not regarded as a requirement to appear on the stage at Stratford, Ontario. Fortunately for Forrester, her singing career was glorious enough to survive even this ugly blot. Barely.



Rather than skilled musical performers, the Ontario stage was infested with third-rate clowns who felt free to be "funny" whenever and, alas, however possible.



Evidently, Stratford's dramaturge, a person who might someday hope to aspire to the higher calling of hack, decided that W. S. Gilbert was incompetent and out of date, so Gilbert's words were improved by the addition of Canadian local references and allusions to long-since forgotten political shenanigans in Ottawa.



In the original broadcast, the director carefully explained how he had cut away a century of moldy tradition to return Gilbert and Sullivan to their music hall roots. If he had uttered such preposterous nonsense to Sullivan, who was a gentlemen, the formally trained and very serious composer would have smiled politely and promptly absented himself from such an obvious fool. If the director had made that monstrous suggestion to Gilbert, who was not, the fiery and short-tempered dramatist would first have punched the bounder's lights out and then hauled him into court for slander.



Pitiful, just purely pitiful."