 I remember back in the 1950's I bought a Record Player and my Father said go back and buy some Gilbert & Sullivan records and I was soon a Savoyard. Just the other day I was in the shower singing ".....three Little Maids From School Are We!" and my wife said....."You need to see a Shrink!" |
Thursday, October 20, 2016
#4 BAC
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I might add that we were playing dates in the Chicago area that year when I noticed in the paper that the Doyly Carte Opera Company was in town on an American Tour.
I managed to make it into town one evening and saw "P1nfore" with "Trial by Jury" as the curtain raiser.
Martyn Green was the Principal Artist.
Richard D'Oyly Carte built the Savoy Theater
adjacent to the Savoy hotel in London in 1881
Hence the term "Savoyard"
My first exposure to Gilbert & Sullivan, which occurred when I was quite young, was via an album of 78-rpm records of “favorite excerpts” from H.M.S. PINAFORE, performed by the Victor Light Opera Orchestra and Chorus. For my 5th birthday, my folks got me a little “suitcase” portable record player. Among the records I played on it were some Gilbert & Sullivan patter songs, performed by Nelson Eddy. (By the time I started Kindergarten, I knew the lyrics to all of those songs by heart, including “My Name is John Wellington Wells” and “I am the Very Model of a Modern Major General.” My uncle was a colonel in the U.S. Air Force. At one of his duty stations, he and some of the other officers had a Gilbert & Sullivan group that would meet regularly to listen to recorded G & S operettas. I still have his album of 78-rpm records for THE GONDOLIERS, featuring the legendary Henry Lytton in the role of the Duke of Plaza-Toro. Uncle Lee also had many of the G & S boxed sets of LPs that were released in the U.S. on the “London” ffrr label. Many of them featured Martyn Green singing the patter roles. Most of those London sets are now available quite reasonably on CDs. A good introduction to the world of Mr. Gilbert and Mr. Sullivan is the 2000 Mike Leigh movie TOPSY-TURVY starring Jim Broadbent as Gilbert. (It gives a fairly accurate account of how THE MIKADO came to be produced.)
Speaking of Gilbert & Sullivan, the 111th Edition Red Unit’s aerial ballet was themed “The Good Ship Ringling” and featured a lot of G&S music in its score.
Thank you, somebody finally mentioned The Mikado.
Speaking of THE MIKADO, I have in my collection the souvenir program from the 10-day engagement the Polack Bros. Circus played in San Diego for the Al Bahr Temple back in 1946. (The performances took place at Lane Field, a baseball stadium once located at the foot of Broadway in downtown San Diego. The “indoor” Ringling show also appeared there.) Among the program’s advertisements is one for the San Diego Civic Light Opera’s (aka Starlight) first production -- THE MIKADO – which was presented outdoors in the San Diego Zoo’s Wegeforth Bowl. (Starlight’s later outdoor productions were staged in the Ford Bowl in Balboa Park.)
I remember back in 1981 when we were at the Louisville Zoo for the summer. There was a local theater doing Gilbert & Sullivan, I think it was the Mikado. Chico stayed behind to watch the elephants, dad unhooked the Cab Over International truck from the semi trailer and off we went.
We parked on a residential side street that had a sizable incline. Needless to say at 11 years old I felt self conscious about parking a semi truck taking half the street space up.
Also.... I was too young to appreciate the production.
>Side Note<
When were were on long drives my dad would recite these long poem/stories one both Dalilah & I asked for him to repeat many times was "The Yarn of the Nancy Bell" written by W.S. Gilbert.
The Yarn of the Nancy Bell
It was either in 60 or 61
when I spent part of a summer
as an assistant electrician
on Reithoffer's main unit
when I took a cabover IH to
a drive in with some lucky
young lady & they let me in
but had to park in the last
row near the concessions
Certainly easy to see above
the rows of cars but who
was looking at the screen
Here is the link to the ULTIMATE Gilbert & Sullivan site. You can spend literally hours and hours here reading about each of the G&S light operas, light operas written by Gilbert without Sullivan and vice versa, recordings, movies and television productions of G&S operettas, members of the original casts, Gilbert’s "Bab Ballads," etc., etc., etc.:
http://www.gilbertandsullivanarchive.org/
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