"No, that isn't the wrong clip. It really is the opening salvo of Sir Arthur Sullivan's overture to Yeoman of the Guard or, The Merryman and His Maid. Fifteen-ish bars from an atypical full-bodied overture that leads to a grand Sullivan musical score unlike any in previous operettas. In fact, nothing is what you might expect. What you will enjoy is the same brilliant Sir William S. Gilbert wordsmithing spewing forth complicated adventures of conniving and flawed, confused and wacky, love-sick and needy humans;"
""Yeoman subverts expectations," confirmed LOoP Artistic Director and actor Laurence Cox in a recent phone conversation with OAW. "Those topsy-turvy moments were left behind in Ruddigore," said Cox, referring to Gilbert and Sullivan's tenth operetta that immediately preceded Yeoman. In fact, it was events around Ruddigore which served as a flash point for a real-life bit of drama between the two creative men. Though it was not Gilbert and Sullivan's first disagreement over plot and style - the run-up to Mikado was very contentious - this was a significant kerfuffle."
The overture to Yeoman of the Guard opens with a brief, forceful musical gesture that leads into a grand and atypical Sullivan score. The production abandons fairy-tale and comic contrivances familiar from other operettas and instead focuses on intricate human conflicts driven by Gilbert's incisive wordplay. Characters are conniving, flawed, confused, wacky, love-sick, and needy, set in sixteenth-century London. Yeoman subverts audience expectations and follows tensions that arose around the preceding operetta Ruddigore, which generated real-life disputes between Gilbert and Sullivan over plot and artistic seriousness. By the mid-1880s the partnership was commercially successful yet artistically fraught.
Read at Oregon ArtsWatch * Arts & Culture News
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