| . | 01/25/2002
NYGASP "Mikado" for Season's Grand Finale
By: Bruce-Michael Gelbert
The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP), usually in residence uptown at Symphony Space, completed a successful, first ever City Center season of G & S favorite operettas, in January, with a well-sung account of "The Mikado," which did not want for humor, vitality or grandeur. Mercilessly skewered here are absurd legal technicalities, government bureaucracy, pomposity, and overblown operatic conventions, and, replete with fitting topical references and larger-than-life characterizations, this witty
"Mikado," conducted and staged by Artistic Director Albert Bergeret, certainly satisfied.
Heading the ensemble, which executed stylized movement with precision and wielded painted fans and parasols expertly, was baritone Keith Jurosko, a Mikado of Japan who personified grandezza. Describing criminal offenders and innovative punishments in "A More Humane Mikado," Jurosko included gangsta
rappers, cellphone users, and music critics among society's undesirables, whose like he would subject to such ordeals as having to sing castrato arias in the original key and enduring "a life with Tammy Faye."
Stephen Quint, as the spectacularly unqualified Lord High Executioner, Ko-Ko, was clearly overwhelmed by the size and weight of the ax that he carried when he entered. When he sought to ease his burden by toting it around on a scooter, dour voice of law and order Pooh Bah (Philip Reilly) read him the riot act on safety and clapped a helmet on his head. Quint's up-to-date "little list" of potential victims for the block included Canon photographers, Pokemon fans, "the checkout girl at Rite-Aid who's perpetually pissed," and
the Three Tenors. In addition to all the fun, Quint managed a truly touching "Willow, Tit-Willow" as well.
After a couple of lightweight, though admirable, singers in the contralto roles in the previous weeks' "H.M.S. Pinafore" and "Pirates of Penzance," it was a pleasure to have in Melissa Parks a Katisha possessing a heroic operatic instrument, offering a character of mock-tragic dimensions, a figure out of Beethoven's "Fidelio," Bellini's "Norma," or one of Verdi's operas. The singer's resemblance to today's leading Wagnerian soprano was noted in mention of an affidavit witnessed not only by "Lord Mayor Bloomberg," but also by "the second runner-up in the Jane Eaglen look-alike contest." Parks' contribution to the expansive first act finale, in which Katisha threatens to reveal Nanki-Poo's true, royal identity, and her solo, "Alone, and Yet Alive," were appropriately gloom and doom-laden and she lightened up believably for "There Is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast," the sprightly duet with Quint's Ko-Ko, to which she appended a high B-flat as a penultimate note. Romantic leads Laurelyn Watson, as Yum-Yum, and Keith Jameson, as Nanki-Poo,
collaborated on a "Were You Not to Ko-Ko Plighted" that boasted the tenderness and delicacy of a light Donizetti or Bellini romantic duet. Soprano Watson offered a melting second act solo, "The Sun, Whose Rays Are All Ablaze," and later, pondering her possible destiny, hummed a bit of her adopted spiritual descendant Madama Butterfly's "Un bel di." Tenor Jameson introduced himself in a lyrical "Wandr'ing Minstrel" ballad as bel canto as almost any Almaviva's "Ecco ridente" (from "Barbiere di
Siviglia").
As Pish-Tush, baritone Richard Alan Holmes described the monarch's reforms in a polished "Our Great Mikado, Virtuous Man." Reilly's Pooh-Bah included "Vice-President in charge of document shredding for Enron" among the many posts he holds and, as he switched political hats fluidly, changed voices as well, impersonating Mae West, American presidents, and other notables along the way. Eva Rainforth and Robin Bartunek, as Yum-Yum's sisters Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo, completed the cast.
Quint, Holmes and Reilly joined voices for a notable "I Am So Proud," the complex trio, which pits three
differently-paced melodies against each other and concludes with tongue-twisting patter. Watson, Rainforth and Bartunek's merry "Three Little Maids From School" merits special mention, as do Watson, Rainforth,
Jameson and Holmes' exquisitely harmonized madrigal, "Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day," Watson, Jameson and Quint's sparkling "Here's a How-De-Do!" and its encores, and the skillfully coordinated consecutive quintets "See How the Fates Their Gifts Allot," sung by Jurosko, Parks, Quint, Rainforth and Reilly, and "The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring," with the latter three and Jameson and Watson. A delightful surprise was the company's substitution of such contemporary names as Mitsubishi, Seico, Sony and Toyota for the "Japanese" words of the chorus that hails the Mikado at his entrance.
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