Patience is as funny as any of the other great G&S collaborations, but unlike the heavy hitters in the canon (The Mikado, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance), it really needs to be in the hands of actors who can do that comedy-of-manners style while trilling an intricate G&S score.
by Lamplighters
Those other scores have to a degree been absorbed by osmosis into our collective artistic bloodstream, and can thrive in a variety of contexts. But Patience needs the Lamplighters Musical Theatre touch. Fortunately, that very troupe is bringing the operetta to the boards in its next production, playing at Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco (Jan. 15-17) and the Lesher Center for the Arts, Walnut Creek (Jan. 29-31).
The Lamplighters have the style internalized, which allows them to focus on realistic details that bring their shows to vibrant life. Director Jane Erwin Hammett, though, emphasizes that her actors not get caught up in the style too much. “It's about telling the story, having the vision of what Gilbert is tryng to say. How do we deepen that? It's easy in this type of genre to get caught up in the form and to stop listening [to the other actors onstage]. You have to respond, at every moment, to what's really happening onstage. Although these characters are essentially caricatures, underneath that there has to be a real person – the motivation has to be honest.”In a way, it’s too bad that W.S. Gilbert was so spot-on in his satire of the contemporary poetic movements of his day, for almost the only thing anyone knows about Patience now is that it satirizes Oscar Wilde — and even that happens to be unlikely. (Patience was produced in 1881, the year in which Wilde published his first book of poems.) Instead, the focus of the parody is much more general, and involves literary characters (such as Algernon Swinburne and James McNeill Whistler) who were far better known at the time, though are much less known to modern audiences.
But let’s widen the circle: The “aesthetic” movement had ties to England’s “pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood” and the French symbolist poets, who are heirs of Charles Baudelaire (born 1821), who was an enthusiast of Wagner’s music dramas and ... You can encompass a wide swath of 19th-century Romantic culture by playing the “six degrees of separation” game, and Gilbert’s satire is equally apt to much of it. If you’ve ever see Robert Wilson’s dreamy Metropolitan Opera production of Wagner’s Lohengrin, with its artificial poses and gestures held for long periods, remember the following bit of dialogue from Patience. The local army officers are trying to impress their aesthetically minded girlfriends by getting into the swing of things and “striking a pose”:
Colonel (posing): I’m afraid we’re not quite right.
Angela: Not supremely, perhaps, but oh so all-but! Oh Saphir, are they not quite too all-but?
Saphir: They are indeed jolly utter!
Major (in agony): I wonder what the Inner Brotherhood usually recommend for cramp.
Sure, Gilbert is always funny, but in contrasting blunt, commonsense characters like soldiers and the milkmaid Patience with the outrageously flamboyant poets Bunthorne and Grosvenor, he’s struck an almost inexhaustible vein of comedy that doesn’t really need translation. Patience will still make you cry with laughter if you give it half a chance.
Everyone in Patience tries to turn themselves into something they are not. The soldiers, when they first arrive, sing that they joined the army because the uniform attracts the ladies. Even Patience, the milkmaid, gets caught up in the aesthetic craze, taking up an abstract idealization of love. Hammett notes the story's universal angle: “If you've ever tried to turn yourself into something else and failed, this is the show for you.”