BYU’s “The Gondoliers” - Next time, let’s try it with the lights out.
Tuesday, June 19th, 2007I arrived at the theater without having eaten anything since my breakfast in Mona, which I suppose could account for part of my disappointment in the show. BYU’s music department has a number of excellent vocal performers, which shows in the quality of the cast’s singing. Unfortunately, this production was filled with great vocalists with little talent for acting, a poor director, a poor choreographer, a poor lighting-designer, and a poor sound-engineer. I wish that the theater department would be more involved with the Spring Operas. Somehow, they did a good job with Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, but this production had serious problems.
The ensemble sounded marvelous for an ensemble. Unfortunately, I’m usually only aware of the quality of the singing when it is especially good or especially bad. My mind is usually tuned more to acting. Most of the female characters had a look of maniacal glee while they were on stage, and half of the men appeared to be concentrating on blocking and lyrics, seemingly having forgotten that they had characters to portray.
When the two leads, Marco and Giuseppe, first appeared, I was pleased. Marco had performed very well as Frederic in “Pirates of Penzance”, and did another outstanding job in this production. As he was singing “Take a pair of sparkling eyes”, I remembered why I loved the theatre, and was moved to applaud as loud as I could. At first, I thought that Giuseppe was appropriately comical, and exuded a good amount of energy. Unfortunately, he continued to overdo it, and became rather annoying as the show continued. I think I could have enjoyed it if the director had reigned him in a little, and helped him find that happy place between “past the footlights” and “over the top”.
The Duke and Duchess performed well, in spite of bad direction. The daughter and Luiz the drummer were even better. Luiz did a wonderful job of finding the right level of comedy for his character, and kept it consistent. Something I don’t think I would have noticed had I not been forced to compare him to his cast mates.
And now for the biggest disappointment of the evening, the Grand Inquisitor, Don Alhambra. His character is meant to be authoritative, but instead, he bumbled about the stage, stuttering his words in a voice that made him sound as though he had recently come down with a bad cold. I believe this was an attempt to make himself sound snobbish. I cringed ever time he appeared on stage. The director should have quashed this character from day one, and helped the poor player find some other way of portraying the part. In spite of his dismal failure in acting the part, he sang it very well. Unfortunately, one of his songs (”There lived a king, as I’ve been told”) was cut from the performance.
Once again, as happens to me quite a bit in Utah, I found myself sitting down while the rest of the audience rose for a standing ovation. Hasn’t anybody seen The Incredibles? Don’t they understand that if everybody is super, than nobody is? Or to take a line from the show that we all had just watched, “When every one is somebody, then no one’s anybody!” A standing ovation used to mean something. Now I sit through them almost every time I attend the theater. At times, I have been moved to stand during a curtain call, or to briefly stand to appreciate a particular actor, but I hold those moments for occasions when I am truly impressed. To paraphrase President Kimball, “What do [standing ovations] mean when given out like pretzels and robbed of [value]?
Despite these issues and other technical shortcomings, I am still happy that I was able to attend the show. BYU has some wonderful talent in the area of vocal performance. I only wish that they would have presented the material in a simple concert setting, and saved me the pain of sitting through the full theatrical performance.