A Night at the Operetta

Sometimes you just go.

Nolan was part of the Squad back when Lauren was in high school – one of those friends who no longer knock on our front door because they know they can just come on in and be welcome. It’s good to have friends like that. The Squad hared off in different directions once they got to college but they’ve pretty much stayed close anyway – I got a phone call from Lauren the other day with one of those “that’s a weird question that I’ll bet my dad would know the answer to” requests and there were three other members of the Squad there with her. We had a lovely time saying hello! And I actually did know the answer to the original question, though not the follow-up. Win some, lose some.

Nolan ended up as a theater major where he went to college, and this is the year when everyone starts graduating, so his performance as Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance would be his last one before moving on to the next stage of his life. Kim discovered this and announced that she was going to see the show – it’s a good couple of hours’ drive from Our Little Town, which is how you know we live in the midwest where such a thing sounds reasonable. I thought about it for a bit because that’s a long drive, but in the end it wasn’t really a decision. Of course I’m going. That’s what you do.

Although we originally thought the performance was today rather than yesterday. It was a bit of a scramble to shift things around, but not all that hard in the end.

Oliver started a graduate program this semester and was weighed down with assignments so he couldn’t come with us. But we picked up Lauren on the way, bought tickets online while driving, and made it to the theater with about ten minutes to spare.

 

It was a really lovely performance. Nolan is one of the most gifted physical comedians I’ve ever seen, and he used that to full effect in this performance. He’s more than that, of course – his slow fade from comedy to madness as the emcee in Cabaret a few years back was a thing of beauty and frankly terrifying – but honestly Gilbert & Sullivan is a place where you're supposed to just let it all loose, chew on the scenery, and enjoy the ride. His footwork during the Modern Major General song was worth the price of admission alone.

I’d never seen a Gilbert & Sullivan show before, despite a lifetime of theater. Oh I knew the play – you can’t spend any time in theater and not have most of the G&S repertoire done for you, one bit at a time, by your peers. They’re like Monty Python that way, which is probably not a coincidence. If you’ve never had the pleasure, it’s basically two hours of set-piece comic songs draped over just enough plot to justify the next song in line, and in this case the story revolves around a pirate apprentice with an overdeveloped sense of duty (chest thump), a squadron of daughters of a retired English general, a dancing chorus of English bobbies, and an unfortunate quirk of the calendar. The sense of duty (chest thump) gets things going, and then everything rolls downhill from there. At one point they haul out an old-fashioned ring life preserver from a pirate chest and I don’t know if anyone else appreciated the fact that it had "HMS Pinafore" painted on it but I did.

The cast was talented, the pit orchestra was live and in form, and I had fun watching the lighting because that’s just me. What more can you want?

We caught up with Nolan afterward just to congratulate him on his performance and we spent some time doing that before he had to move on and make his rounds. We even called Oliver so he could pass on his best as well, as you can see in the bottom photo.

And then we drove home. We got in far too late, but today was not a work day and the cat let us sleep in.

Sometimes you just go. It’s always worth it in the end.