March 31, 2011 by Joseph Jon Lanthier
This went up on Slant earlier this week, but I neglected to post it amid personal life turbulence. Whatever else can be said, Gilbert and Sullivan make for quite “creative” break-up music. Excerpt:
…It’s this, and the striking modernity of the gags, that have preserved The Mikado‘s glory in spite of its now-esoteric satirical content. (The easy laughs are often the deepest and most familiar: When the jilted betrothed Katisha attempts to expose the protagonist’s secret royal heritage, the crowd continually interrupts her with Monty Python-like nonsense.) And so the disappointment of the 1939 film adaptation of the opera by director Victor Schertzinger and producer/composer Geoffrey Toye, now out on Blu-ray, rests less on the clumsy hacking received by the already convoluted libretto and more on the awkwardness with which the play’s usually sharp comedy is rendered. To be sure, the fusillade of exposition provided by the introductory title cards makes David Lynch’s Dune appear narratively competent. But one feels as though he isn’t supposed to follow the story too doggedly here anyhow. What we truly miss is the half-smirking pomposity of Gilbert and Sullivan’s élan; the simplicity of the camera angles and by-the-book editing pace can’t quite keep up with the deftness of the music or lyrics.
Read the rest you know where.
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