Patience

By means of a device I choose to call Russell's Law--after the pioneer investigator, Miss Anna Russell--every Gilbert and Sullivan director for the past half century has managed to save his show from complete collapse. As the dialogue becomes ever more insufferably insipid, and the music more desperately dull, (I phrase this in the style of Miss Russell) for God's sake, ham it up.

William Allin Storrer, the director of the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players' new production of Patience, is, unlike President Pusey, no man to buck tradition; and he has infested the opera buffa with no end of comic items--dragoons drop their rifles on each other's feet, march in the wrong direction, and traipse through interminable jerky morrices with the female chorus of "twenty lovesick maidens" (some twelve in number). One budding Cantinflas, Kenneth Tiger, is even made to flourish that old gag prop, the rubber sword.

Unfortunately, Mr. Storrer's valiant efforts are over balanced by Mr. Gilbert's somewhat witless book. Of all the G and S satires, Patience is undoubtedly the most dated and least funny. The poetry of the pre-Raphaelite aesthetics is about as current as the hula-hoop. And, with only a few notable exceptions, the frenetic efforts of this year's troupe simply cannot disguise Bab's droning.

The notable exceptions, I am happy to say, are quite wonderful. Anthony S. Whyatt as the "Fleshly Poet"--a dig at Wilde--is the very essence of Oscar; mincing his way delicately across the stage, he inevitably gets a laugh every time he opens his quietly disdainful mouth. Whyatt is upstaged only by his Buttercupesque admirer, the Lady Jane, played with waspish hauteur by Dorothea Schmidt (she is particularly magnificent at the opening of the Second Act, when she is discovered in a glade singing a plaintive lay, and accompanying herself on a double bass). Her singing voice I can only describe as a magnificent and artfully manipulated foghorn.

The other principals are somewhat less polished. To Patience Joan Corbett brought a voice that Miss Russell would categorize as "English--pleasant, pure, and utterly sexless." The stock part of the yearning tenor Gilbert has split into two roles, a comic duke and a second poet--this one Swinburne. (One of the chief technical flaws of Patience is W.S.G.'s halfhearted attempts to tinker with a successful and standard formula; the only result is a fragmentation of the familiar.) As the duke, Stephen A. Barre has a few good gestures and not much of a voice. The voice of the "Idyllic Poet" (John Edwards) is capricious, but his performance of an essentially stolid part is essentially satisfactory.

As for the others, well, the dragoons march vigorously enough, but they have certain intonation problems; the twelve lovesick maidens posture rather excessively, but they sing very prettily. An orchestra would have been better than two pianos; costumes are adequate, if somewhat loosely fitted; and Mr. David Gullette's set is, though dappled, quite ugly--almost Disneyesque.

The Times reviewer of the first night performance in 1881, last night's program informed me, suffered from an "embarras de richesse." Rather different pains attacked me; Patience is simply not worth performing. But, in all fairness, the G and S Players have done their damnedest to make the thing worth seeing.