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March 18, 2005 > Arts & Entertainment > RLOS offers Gilbert and Sullivan satire with gusto

RLOS offers Gilbert and Sullivan satire with gusto

By Lindsey Gilbert | Thresher Editorial Staff

Good satire, unlike good wine, does not age gracefully. Were it not for the handy footnotes in their Norton Anthologies, high schoolers everywhere might dismiss Jonathan Swift as a baby-eating heathen. How could they know he proposed English-Irish reform, not infant fricassee?

Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta Patience, first performed in 1881, could use some footnotes of its own. A send-up of longhaired, dreamy-eyed aesthetes like Oscar Wilde, the score demands a working knowledge of the 19th-century aesthetic movement. Good luck to the man who does not know the Della Cruscan from the Early English or the medieval from the Anglo-Japanese.

The Rice Light Opera Society does its best to bring Patience to the masses. Director Lauren Holmes, a Will Rice College junior, plays up the jokes everyone can get — a fickle maiden swooning over a sham poet, a Narcissus soliloquizing over a mirror, a solider tripping over a stool. With smart staging and brilliant costuming, the show overcomes its outdated source material and rebounds from some weaker moments in the middle, where its energy lags.

Alumnus Jonathan Ichikawa (Will Rice ‘04) plays Bunthorne, an ordinary gentleman who poses as an aesthete to impress the local maidens. With a flourish of his quill and a clearing of his throat, he lures them away from their betrothed fiancees, the soldiers of the British Dragoon Guard. Bunthorne basks in the attention but lusts after Patience (vocal graduate student Alexandra Boule-Buckley), a milkmaid untaught in the ways of love.

Ichikawa and Boule-Buckley shine as they ham up their ill-fated courtship. Ichikawa, who founded the Rice Light Opera Society in 2001, has a charismatic stage presence that commands attention. He does well with Sullivan’s lively, though unremarkable, score.

Boule-Buckley earns laughs as she fends off the advances of both Bunthorne and Archibald Grosvenor (Brown College freshman Stephan Hammel), a rival poet who further distracts the village maidens. She fixes her face in an expression of puzzled innocence and proceeds to hit high note after high note in the pursuit of ‘unselfish love.’ Patience insists she can only marry a man she despises; to love a perfect man would be wholly selfish. Accordingly, she rejects Grosvenor, her soul mate and a true aesthete, and accepts the insufferable Bunthorne. Holding her milk-pail primly in front of her apron, Boule-Buckley is the very picture of a country milkmaid.

Ichikawa and Boule-Buckley make themselves utterly ridiculous but succeed with the kind of deadpan delivery comedic satire demands. Hanszen College sophomore Kira Austin-Young has a successful turn as the comic Lady Jane, a fat spinster who remains loyal to Bunthorne when all the other maidens defect to Grosvenor. Austin-Young marches onstage at the end of the first act with a pair of cymbals and takes obvious delight in crashing them together.

The players are at their best when the full ensemble takes the stage. Many of the solo numbers drag, particularly in the second act, but energy resumes whenever the eight members of the Dragoon Guard arrive to belt out a lively tune. The soldiers pair nicely with the members of the female chorus, who live up to their billing as ‘rapturous maidens’ by swooning, swaying and sighing as they flock around their aesthete of the moment.

Holmes opts for a simple set design but makes the most of a multi-level stage. She positions competing groups on different levels; as the jealous soldiers stand at attention behind, the maidens kneel at Bunthorne’s feet.

Bright costuming by Houston resident Lauren White completes the effect. The soldiers wear authentic-looking uniforms in yellow and red — hideous primary colors, as the maidens point out — and the maidens themselves wear soft pastels over natural white. Patience and Grosvenor, the soul mates, match in pastoral green, and White captures both milkmaid and poet dead-on. When the full ensemble takes the stage, the colors dazzle and the costumes convince. Chances are the average attendee will not understand many of the pointed barbs Gilbert and Sullivan aim at the 19th-century aesthete, but Holmes wisely fills her production with bright colors and funny, charming moments that capture Gilbert’s satirical intent.

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