After the Mikado

Reference 1 being a chance purchase – by card for £1 – of a book picked up in the margins of a visit to the Performing Arts Library associated with the regular library at Bourne Hall of Ewell. The people at reference 2.

With Alan Hyman, late of St. Cyprian’s and the Cambridge branch of Magdalene, having been journalist, author and script writer. A short entry is to be found at reference 3.

With the book being an easy going story of light opera from the days of Gilbert & Sullivan through to the first world war. Plenty of illustrations and plenty of quotes from once popular songs. The story line seems to be that although the Gilbert & Sullivan partnership, under the able management of D’Oyly Carte pulled off a dozen or so hit shows, the world moved on after than partnership ran out of puff and broke up, sadly acrimoniously, with Gilbert making a bit of an unpleasant ass of himself. The world – that is to say London audiences – wanted lighter, brighter and cheaper fare – essentially a string of songs framed with enough of a story to hold the thing together and with comedy turns thrown in to vary the diet. Maybe a few shapely legs. Gilbert & Sullivan were too clever and too expensive. Presumably cheaper fare which anticipated the sort of musicals one gets now – although I never been to more than one or two of them, and that probably more than forty years ago. But that is not to knock them: creating such a show required a great deal of talent, skill and hard work if it was to succeed. As Mr. Murdoch once pointed out, much harder to make a success of the ‘Sun’ than you might think: a lot more to it than salacious pictures on page 3. Knocking out a ‘Guardian’ was a doddle by comparison.

A business with a number of roles, sometimes combined: backers (for the money, for the speculation), producer, book writer (the book provides some narrative and holds the whole thing together), song writer (words, aka librettist), song writer (music, aka composer), conductor (aka Director of Music) and singers (maybe choruses as well as soloists). The Gilbert & Sullivan partnership was unusual both for its success and its longevity. Much more usual for people to be brought together for a show and then to go their separate ways afterwards.

As seen from the outside, a cheerful world, but a world which was driven by audiences. When the numbers fell away, a show was taken down. With a run of 100 performances being considered bad, 500 very good and 1,000 exceptional. Successful producers – including here D’Oyly Carte – often overreached themselves, pouring far more money into a production than they got back in receipts, sometimes bankrupting themselves in the process. While sometimes it was necessary to keep your nerve: some shows started out badly but ended up doing very well. Perhaps with some feverish reworking behind the scenes. While lots of the stars, both composers and executants, were into fast and expensive living, winding up with not much at all – apart from memories – to show for it all. Quite a lot of substance abuse, illness and early death.

There was a lot of traffic between the old and new worlds, with some of these London shows working in the new world, some not. While the musical shows described in this book were, in very large part, swept away by the first world war and the arrival of jazz and other catchy phenomena from that new world.

There was a lot of traffic between the more refined world of light opera and the less refined world of the music hall. While if this book is anything to go by, more or less none between the worlds of high opera and light opera, Sullivan’s efforts in that direction notwithstanding.

A couple of samples from the big hit of the end of the century, Floradora, are to be found at YouTube references 6 and 7 – but they do not do much for me. Perhaps they would come off better in the theatre, rather than taken out of context on a laptop. Or, worse, still, a telephone.

An interesting read, an interesting complement to book noticed at reference 8. Well worth the pound I paid for it.

PS 1: I learn in the margins of this post that proper people know that proper Oxford people drop the terminal ‘e’ from their Magdalene, thus making it unnecessary to further specify which one is which.

PS 2: Lillie Langtry of reference 5 does not appear at all, although her Bertie does, despite being very much part of the theatrical scene for much of the period covered here. No voice.

References

Reference 1: Sullivan and his satellites: A survey of English operettas 1860-1914 – Alan Hyman – 1978. 

Reference 2: https://www.newspal.org.uk/library.html. 

Reference 3: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alan_Hyman. Maybe one should start ranking people by the length of their Wikipedia entry. Maybe working in frequency of access and frequency of update somehow.

Reference 4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/D%27Oyly_Carte_Opera_Company. 

Reference 5: https://psmv5.blogspot.com/2022/08/more-langtry.html. 

Reference 6: https://youtu.be/IvlgSA9INx8. 

Reference 7: https://youtu.be/EbW6Rpx-q10. 

Reference 8: https://psmv3.blogspot.com/2018/09/sullivan.html.