Bunthorne and Grosvenor were rival gym owners (I don't know what the dragoons were) and Lady Jane performed 'Silvered is the raven hair' from an exercise bike.
Okay, someone was very impressed by Peter Sellars.
(I was touchy about G&S at seventeen.)
It happens!
I think my benchmark for personally experienced WTF staging is still the production of Halévy's La Juive that I saw with friends at the Met in 2003. We agreed afterward that we could not blame the creative team for the fact that Neil Shicoff's bronchitis got the upper hand at the intermission and he dropped out right before "Rachel, quand du seigneur," leaving the last act and a half to be performed by his understudy whose fault it wasn't either that he was shortish and round where Shicoff was tallish and thin; that was just bad timing. We definitely blamed the creative team for the set, however, since it was ultra-modernist abstract black-and-white and so steeply raked that we unironically worried about the singers losing their footing and ending up in the orchestra. The conceit of blocking the Gentiles above and the Jews below was obviously intended as a societal metaphor but in practice actually suggested that Eléazar's family was living in the basement of the imperial palace and everyone was just too polite to say so. The costuming jettisoned fifteenth-century Konstanz in favor of Nazi Germany complete with yellow Jude stars—but also eighteenth-century Austrian guardsmen for some reason—and we could find no other way to interpret the finale except that the Jewish maiden of the title was murdered by Klansmen in a pot of stoplights. On the bright side, it gave us something to talk about on the train back to New Haven. And occasionally still today.
no subject
Okay, someone was very impressed by Peter Sellars.
(I was touchy about G&S at seventeen.)
It happens!
I think my benchmark for personally experienced WTF staging is still the production of Halévy's La Juive that I saw with friends at the Met in 2003. We agreed afterward that we could not blame the creative team for the fact that Neil Shicoff's bronchitis got the upper hand at the intermission and he dropped out right before "Rachel, quand du seigneur," leaving the last act and a half to be performed by his understudy whose fault it wasn't either that he was shortish and round where Shicoff was tallish and thin; that was just bad timing. We definitely blamed the creative team for the set, however, since it was ultra-modernist abstract black-and-white and so steeply raked that we unironically worried about the singers losing their footing and ending up in the orchestra. The conceit of blocking the Gentiles above and the Jews below was obviously intended as a societal metaphor but in practice actually suggested that Eléazar's family was living in the basement of the imperial palace and everyone was just too polite to say so. The costuming jettisoned fifteenth-century Konstanz in favor of Nazi Germany complete with yellow Jude stars—but also eighteenth-century Austrian guardsmen for some reason—and we could find no other way to interpret the finale except that the Jewish maiden of the title was murdered by Klansmen in a pot of stoplights. On the bright side, it gave us something to talk about on the train back to New Haven. And occasionally still today.