Stephen Quint and the ZOMBIE MIKADO

NAKED WOMEN!!!

         

What can it be about January 23?

Leonard Pinth-Garnell, J. Pinkerton-Snoopington, and Stephen Quint! All Born Yesterday! It's too much happiness!

          Ernie Kovacs,   Franklin Pangborn

Why, according to astrologically-inclined types, I probably share a bunch of traits with Franklin Pangborn! How that very idea makes me open my eyes wide and tremble with indignation!

But I'm writing because I have bigger fish to fry. Yes, things are happening, and happening fast. But first, I have to generate a bunch of words so I can get away from this picture of me and on to weightier stuff. My calendar arrived -- extremely promptly -- from the Rose Valley Chorus and Orchestra. "For 100 years, Rose Valley Chorus & Orchestra has presented the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas in the popular Savoyard tradition. Now, in RVC&O's100th year and with due respect to Gilbert and Sullivan, twenty-seven women have come together, joined by common threads of a love of theatre and a love of art, to present Gilbert & Sullivan characters in non-traditional NUDE GLORY!" 55 is the average age. Five are over 70 and 4 are under 40! Other than that, and a few factoids about professions and stuff, the women aren't identified! Preposterous! My favorite photo is Ruth, Pirates of Penzance, with one foot up on a treasure chest and draped with a skull and crossbones. "47"? Hmm. There's a fabulous Fairy Queen, looking like a Ziegfield tableau. A naked Patience with milk pails with a naked Lady Jane with cello. Take a look and order a copy RIGHT HERE. Printed on really cheap, pinkish (rose) paper. Pictures are too small, sharing too much space with a synopsis of each show. Synopses! God, I hate them more than encores. I love the fun attitude about this calendar, but it's nudity for children, you know? Kind of fun, but not a speck of titillation. Not like the impending NYGASP calendar, which will show everything and plenty of it!!! You want pink, we'll show you pink, Rose Valley!

This is the February issue of 'Self.' Yeah, yeah, tone your abs, "new" sex secrets he'll LUV you for, lose 6 pounds in 5 minutes every other Thursday, crap. The reason you will buy this issue, or at least spend ten minutes at a newsstand gawking at it, is the latest article by Valerie Frankel. Last spring Val decided to undergo the experience of POSING NUDE. Not just rude Polaroids -- real arty stuff by an experienced pro photographer with all kinds of lights and assistants! It was an adventure, one she is eager to share with her readers, and includes SIX FLESHY FOTOS! In life-like color! Taken by KOREN REYES  and, I suppose I should add, property of 'Self.' The action starts on page 32.

I should also add, for 'Self'-type readers and other saps, that Val is my beloved wife. Also she'll bitch if I don't.

Here's one of the unused photos from the session. Sorry, this is the biggest I could get it. If you click on it the color looks better.

More "Yeomen" reviews to peruse

Does Eddie Murphy have any friends who can tell him he's made enough movies where he plays big, fat women? Would someone please tell him that I said cut it out?

I've given you links to all the major "Yeomen" reviews but I now present to you links to a few more of some interest. I have extracted the bits that are interesting to me; click on the link (underlined and pink) for the whole thing, particularly if you like to read synopses.

BACKSTAGE, the actors' weekly newspaper, praises Shana Farr, the Elsie understudy ("Her crystalline soprano and lively stage presence woke up the drowsy proceedings"). Also this:
"Unfortunately, neither the company nor its director, Albert Bergeret, knows where to take the piece. Aside from various mishaps (one actor crashed into the scenery, another kept trying to reattach his ruff), the lighting is dim, the sets flimsy, and the evening without fire.

"As compensation, the score was beautifully sung under Bergeret's conducting. The voices of David Root's Fairfax, Richard Alan Holmes' Sergeant Meryll, and Angela Smith's Dame Carruthers blended well. Rounded acting and singing performances were given by Stephen Quint as the melancholy jester Jack Point, Erika Person as the lovesick Phoebe, and, of course, understudy Farr. The chorus was splendid."

The wonderfully erudite Jonathan Ichikawa has a blog that should be of interest to G&S people who find Zombie Mikado to be too full of farts and ALAN HILL (as if!). This is a very well-considered review. Jonathan's Buxton Diary

Here's another blog posting by a young knitting maven ("Lady Knitterly "!) who goes to a lot of concerts. Check out her whole posting, too. Highlights:
"The orchestra, while playing well, sounded underpowered. I couldn't see the pit from where I was sitting, so I actually couldn't see how big it was. Some of the performers were merely adequate, and couldn't really do the work justice. However, some were just great: Richard Alan Holmes as Sergeant Meryll, Laurelyn Watson Chase as Elsie Maynard, and, most especially Stephen Quint as Jack Point, who was the epitome of the classic G & S character. All three were in exceptionally good voice. (I felt so sad for Jack Point at the end, a true testament to Quint's performance.)

"Incidentally, the choreography of the above performance was really amateurish. Really. At times I felt like I was watching a high school musical. Nearly every second was filled with pointless (and distracting) movements and motions. I'm not a huge proponent of stand and sing operas, but really, let the actors act. It's a wonder I could take any of them seriously with all the skipping and gesturing going on."

The orchestra is 25, by the way. There was too much extremely busy dancing. When Jack and Elsie, street entertainers, enter town they are chased by the entire village, who surround them and turn into the Sharks and the Jets! Every single syllable of text has a unified motion grafted to it, people are doing cartwheels... If the residents of the Tower of London really are this adept at entertaining themselves they should throw Jack and Elsie in the river! Really! Keep all the quatrain-reciting, sarabande-dancing riffraff downstream.

We give one more performance of "Yeomen" Saturday, February 3, at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, NJ. We won't have to leave room for a Mikado set, so every time we're directed to go upstage it shouldn't take 5 minutes to get there. Plus, NO MICROPHONES! And that's always fun. But mics are OK, too. It's all good.

It's Alive!

And today, the 20th, is Colin Clive's birthday! I tell you, it's a season of the greats (I was born the 23rd). Dead at the age of 37. Tuberculosis (chain smoker) and severe alcoholism. The lucky performer of the best moment in the best horror movie.

Leslie Howard and Bela Lugosi were also considered for Clive's role. The head of Universal insisted that if Lugosi was going to be in the movie it was going to be as the Monster. But then James Whale came onto the project and everything turned great.

Oliver Norvell Hardy

I'll be damned if I didn't realize today was Ollie's birthday!

Click here to learn about the HARLEM, GA OLIVER HARDY DAY festivities! And I'll eat your hat if it doesn't sound like one heck of a fun time.

Leslie Uggams Tribute to Hammerstein

A nightmare.

preview of NYGASP calendar

The Rose of Persia costumes have me all hepped up about a GIRLS OF NYGASP calendar, or GIRLS OF GILBERT & SULLIVAN, if Al balks at using the company name to make a BILLION DOLLARS. We could show Mabel and other Stanley girls taking off shoes and stockings and maybe a few other things in preparation for "paddling"; a couple of fairies in diaphanous rainment, a full moon behind them if you know what I mean; Buttercup at her most motherly; Yum-Yum and sisters in bath -- as a matter of fact maybe the first calendar should be completely devoted to Mikado. And everyone could wear costumes like this:

                                                                                                      

Who designed these suits, Borat? We just have to believe that 20-something Japanese females really are this clueless!

NYGASP PRESENTS ROSE OF PERSIA! LINE AROUND THE BLOCK!

NYGASP's Rose of Persia has done its thing and is now part of the City Center ether, with Monty Python and Paul Robeson's Othello.

It was kind of a big deal. This piece has not been given a professional performance in 70 years. The Arthur Sullivan Society had crossed the Atlantic, and there were several other, more local G&S groups in attendance. It was quite a good house, as far as I could tell from the orchestra pit.

The set, which is what all reviews seem to talk about first nowdays, was plain and functional, but, god damn it, perfectly adequate. I enjoyed the costumes. The women all wore stripper bras with noisy jangly things attached, and "I Dream of Jeannie" pants. They looked good. NYGASP really should do a calendar.

I refuse to go into any detail whatsoever about the plot. The script was so very poor that it had the effect of making a person feel stupid for trying to understand it. I hate a story (Grand Duke's the same) with a lot of running around and a million characters and everybody's worried about something AND IT'S NEVER CLEAR WHAT ANYONE'S PROBLEM IS. Quote, second clarinetist: "Gee, I could write a better story than this." Any classroom of ten-year-olds could write a better story. And there must be a thousand teenage theater kids in New York who could write better dialogue and lyrics. There was even a duet where the lovers sing baby talk at each other! Be still, my lurching stomach! The only thing that kept the miserable writing of Basil Hood from completely undermining the piece was that he managed to put in a fairly good joke about once every minute. And I do mean joke, not a bit of Gilbertian irony or whimsical character humor. This was augmented by NYGASP SHTICK. There was a Pirates of Penzance paraphrase everyone seemed to get. Richard Holmes squeezed in his old "Like Parsifal but with fewer jokes" line. The whole thing ended with a Mikado paraphrase. I don't mind that kind of stuff, usually, if there's not too much of it, but I have to wonder if that's the kind of thing the Sullivan Society came over to hear. I don't want a Grand Duke, Rose of Persia, or Ivanhoe that's been "improved." In the event of a rare performance like this I want to hear the real thing. If it's abridged, FINE. If it stinks, now we know.

The occasional laughs/laffs were not the only thing that kept the audience awake. Act Two actually had some songs that were not bad. Also the orchestra writing all the way through was more interesting than the usual G&S. The playing of the orchestra was not sabotaged too frequently by Al's unfamiliarity with the score. All the performances were great. It was really excellent, satisfying fun to see NYGASP performers sparkle in absolutely new roles.

Umm... I don't really care to say anything more about Rose of Persia. I don't really care to hear it again, either. I definitely prefer not to SEE it.

Oh -- I saw Beyonce (sp?) yesterday. I arrived at City Center around 1:00. There was a queue (British word, you know) of people starting at the City Center stage door, stretching up 56th and around onto 7th Ave. All young people, all waiting for OPEN DANCE CALLS for some kind of a Beyonce (sp?) tour, or something. The people at the front of the line had obviously been camping there. I left the theater around 5. A lot of people had gone in and had their auditions. I had dinner, came back to the theater, and went out again at 6:30. A giant, black SUV had just pulled up in front of the steps. A giant, black bodyguard opened the back door. People screamed. Flashes flashed. A very pretty little woman stepped out. People waved papers and pens at her. She gave a great smile and a wave and went inside. I laughed.

2007 Reviews, Middle of Run Report

Here are links to the reviews of which I am aware.

The New York Times (Mikado, positive)

The New York Post (Yeomen, postive)

The Newark(?) Times-Ledger (Yeomen, scathing)

The Yeomen reviews laud Shana Farr, the Elsie understudy who went on with little more than the afternoon dress rehearsal. They deplore the set, which is plain to begin with but does look much worse than it should because half of it is 15 further upstage than we (the performers) thought it would be, so that the Mikado set can be hauled in fairly easily. Staging had to be revised as we went during the frantic (naturally) Friday afternoon rehearsal, limited to 3 hours.

This Times-Ledger review is one of the 2 or 3 bad ones I've ever gotten. Jack Point just isn't that funny a character, I'm sorry! He is a bad jester, and he talks too much, hoping that some of it will come out funny. Any one of my star comedy characters in G&S has more funny things to say than Jack Point. His unfunniness is kind of the point, if you take my meaning.

Laurelyn was back in for Elsie Sunday afternoon, and was of course excellent. It was the easiest thing in the world for me to be moved by the gentle kindness with which she looked at me in the final scene.

Tonight: more Laurelyn and a big dose of RICHARD HOLMES in our single, much sort-of anticipated performance of THE ROSE OF PERSIA, book and lyrics by the horrendous Basil Hood, music by a very tired Sir Arthur Sullivan. I will be playing horn in the pit for this one, and probably enjoying the show more than anyone who payed $97 to sit 5 feet from me.

By the way, anyone who's here because my NYGASP program bio was almost devoid of information, click on "ABOUT" on the top left, under my "hungry" picture.

Quint NYGASP reviews

I did two Ko-Kos and two Jack Points (actually three with the dress rehearsal) this weekend, and today I'm too lazy to give you a link to the reviews. Real newspaper stuff, not just any blabbermouth. Go to my WIFE'S WEBSITE.

2007 Rehearsal PANIC

Yeah, yeah, I haven't been writing. And as far as I know no one's been reading. And so it goes.

Tonight is our first Yeomen rehearsal in 11 days (I'm writing on Wednesday). Our first performance is Friday night. Can you amateur company members conceive of this? The company had off for Christmas and then had to spend time (admittedly minimal) preparing our New Year's Eve concert at Symphony Space and having an orchestra rehearsal for The Rose of Persia. But now we're back on the front burner. And, on Friday, out of the frying pan and into the fire.

Every year we bitch about how little rehearsal time we seem to get for City Center, the most important of our gigs. This year it's our standard Mikado, same as always but full of new leads, Rose of Persia, new to all the performers, long, poorly written and therefore extra difficult to learn, full of tricky, rehearsal-absorbing choreography, and Yeomen of the Guard, which we haven't done in years and also contains a lot of new people. It's another long-ish one, written by Gilbert in unnatural, phony Shakespeare. I haven't played my role in 12 years, and then it was in a cheapo, non-NYGASP production with an unenthusiastic director who liked to make cuts.

Tonight's rehearsal is a 5-hour work-through, so it will hopefully do something for me, confidence-wise. If we can spend a few minutes on the final scene, that would be good. And we have a 3-hour rehearsal Friday afternoon before the first performance that night. See the posting below for the schedule.

For Christmas Val, girls, and I drove to Maine (my family), then to Vermont (her family) then back to Brooklyn. Lucy sans Ritalin, jabbering all the way, Maggie begging her to shut up, and spending many hours listening as a family to an unabridged audio book, Eragon. Oh my god, what crap! And the new movie of it is supposedly EVEN WORSE! AVOID!