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(03/06/13 3:46pm)
“The Mikado” remains the greatest of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Savoy Operas, so named after the Savoy Theatre where most of them premiered. Designed to satirize British society through its Japanese characters and setting, this light English opera follows a series of absurd events within the town of Titipu in imperial Japan. The wandering second trombone player Nanki-Poo (played by Daniel Greenwood) has returned after a month of traveling to court his beloved Yum-Yum (Sarah Caldwell Smith), who is one of three wards of the cheap tailor Ko-Ko (David Macaluso) to whom she is also engaged to be married.
Originally having been condemned to die at the hands of the public executioner, Ko-Ko was elevated by the town to the exalted rank of Lord High Executioner under remarkable circumstances. Serving as Ko-Ko’s administration is Pooh-Bah (Louis Dall’Ava), a nobleman of pre-Adamite ancestry who occupies every other government position in Titipu, including Mayor, Attorney-General, Archbishop, and Chief of Police. Also in the town are the nobleman Pish-Tush (David Auxier) and Yum-Yum’s sisters, Petti-Sing and Peep-Bo (Erika Person, Rebecca O’Sullivan), as well as an old noblewoman named Katisha (Caítlín Burke) who pursues her fiancé Nanki-Poo with an unmatched bloodthirstiness. Hilarity ensues when the Mikado of Japan (David Wannen) demands that Ko-Ko must execute someone in the town of Titipu before the Mikado’s arrival.
The performance at the Grand was easily the best live show I’ve seen in Macon, partly because it was organized by the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, the nation’s preeminent G&S ensemble. This cast’s combined experience alone made this a stellar production, and they are currently travelling on tour performing this opera several times a week.
Mr. Macaluso did justice to the role of the cheap tailor-turned-executioner. Macaluso was able to embody Ko-Ko’s comedic potential while making the character accessible to a modern audience, whether he was dragging an absurdly large axe around stage behind him, rolling around stage on an anachronistic kick scooter or just singing about all of the people he included on his list for execution (including the conductor, members of the audience, the people who adapted Les Mis to a movie, and both houses of Congress). Macaluso stole the show.
Louis Dall’Ava’s performance as Pooh-Bah also deserves praise. I haven’t seen many actors wear fat-suits in this role, but Dall’Ava employed the suit in occasional bits of slapstick humor, like bumping into others or rolling around on the stage. He exhibited a certain affable charm that rarely emerges in the character of Pooh-Bah, who is a haughty, sneering and corrupt jack-of-all-trades.
I also want to highlight Caítlín Burke’s beautifully terrifying performance as Katisha, an ugly noblewoman who has fallen for Nanki-Poo and whose only appealing features are found on random body parts, such as her shoulder blade or her left elbow. Through the breadth of her powerful voice, Burke masterfully balanced Katisha’s bloodthirstiness and broken-heartedness.
The opera’s set design, stage direction and theatrical makeup continue to impress me. Also, the staff responsible for costume design deserves exceptional praise for preserving each actor’s autonomy, personality, and individuality.
Finally, I’d also like to praise the conductor Albert Bergeret for his charisma and charm, visible even from the orchestra pit. Heck, I’d like to praise the entire orchestra for the same reason. Not only did the musicians play Sullivan’s original score effortlessly, but there were certain moments when they interacted directly with the actors, which produced a great effect on the audience: Pooh-Bah congratulated the bass drummer’s timing in a particular scene; Ko-Ko even criticized the conductor for not following his pace and tempo in another.
This adaptation of “The Mikado” was an awesome bit of musical theatre, and you should feel sorry if you missed out.
(02/20/13 3:11pm)
I am one of the students who wrote that opinion piece in the Cluster expressing our disapproval with the dministration for inviting Erickson to speak at Founder’s Day.
Although I am a mostly Republican voter from a Baptist family, I couldn’t stay silent on this issue.
I continue to believe Erickson was the wrong person to invite to Mercer for all of the reasons previously stated.
This was never a political thing; the faculty didn’t write our student letter for us or ask us to write a letter to the Cluster.
We were four students expressing our respectful, albeit critical, disapproval with the decision and offering suggestions to improve Founder’s Day.
Naturally, Mr. Erickson has complained that we students who protested his invitation had turned Founder’s Day from “an event designed to be about the University” into an event “about me.”
This sounds like a very reasonable suggestion coming from the man who, when speaking at the event, spent most of his time praising himself, his morals, and his heroic virtues as a student and in his later career (witnesses report that this got a few eye-rolls from the other speakers onstage).
Anyway, he wrote his speech masterfully to avoid sparking controversy while he was on campus, and for that I applaud him.
The coup de grâce of this whole fiasco came after Erickson left campus, when he retreated to Facebook, Twitter, and RedState to defame individual students for their “stupid” or “intolerant” questions and to bash entire departments within our university.
We invited Erickson to our university, we allowed him to flatter himself in front of the student body, we arranged for Mercer Singers to serenade him, we organized a luncheon in his name as our guest of honor and he reciprocates our hospitality by doing the very thing which he claims to have outgrown: slandering and misrepresenting people through social media.
It seems his time at CNN hasn’t tempered his tongue, and I doubt Fox News will do much to encourage him to represent Mercer’s values here and abroad.
What I’m trying to say is that, while I don’t exactly know how the faculty feels, the students never saw this as a dispute between political parties.
It has always been more of a matter of whether Mercer’s values were being reflected.
On the one hand, we value honesty, openness, freedom of expression and thought; on the other hand, we value respect for others, civil discourse, and appropriate and mature criticism free of slander, insults, name-calling, and fabrications.
On Feb. 13, the students and the faculty did not fail these values.
Everyone was the very model of Mercerian civility.
There were no walkouts, picket signs, or scandalous outbursts.
Either we attended the events or we didn’t, and our Founders would be proud of our behavior.
With that in mind, I have faith that we students and faculty will continue to be more respectful in private than Erickson is in public.
(02/20/13 3:11pm)
I was inspired to write this article in the wake of the recent controversy over the choice of Erick Erickson as the Founder’s Day speaker.
I attended the “Civility in Politics” question and answer session and have recently read some opinions entries that decry the homosexual community for labeling conservative views on same-sex marriage as hate speech.
With a lot of talk about respecting others’ opinions, I felt that I would offer my viewpoint, particularly on the issue of same-sex marriage and the influence that religion has had on “The Defense of Marriage.”
Traditionally, if I were to make an argument about a cause or a belief and wanted to be respected, it would be expected that I have some sort of justification for that belief.
If I believe that women are or are not treated on equal footing with men, I ought to have some labor statistics or at the very least a logical argument supporting my viewpoint.
If I thought a certain enzyme performed a certain function in a certain animal species, I would have to present a clearly thought out argument in support of this hypothesis with evidence to back it up.
My question is: why is religion immune to this level of scrutiny?
It is undeniable that religion plays a major role in shaping conservative opinions regarding marriage, and Christian views are often used to defend claims that homosexuals should not be allowed to marry.
What puzzles me is the idea that these opinions ought to be respected.
I believe that some opinions do not deserve respect, with opinions influenced by religion being chief among them.
Religious justification for discrimination of homosexuals is about as satisfactory as a parent telling his or her child to follow orders “because I said so.”
If a group consisting of some of my closest friends and myself decided to lobby to withhold access to equal rights from a group of people out of fear, hate, or misunderstanding and said that our beliefs were influenced by a collection of works of dubious authorship that declare their own authority and were inspired by our collective imaginary friend, people would not give our opinion any credence.
If that imaginary friend is supplanted with “God” and this scenario applied instead to a much larger group of people who maintain their beliefs due to a combination of indoctrination and fear of ostracism – let’s add in a dash of about 1000 years of intellectual and monetary privilege – then all of the sudden people listen to that opinion, even if no evidence is provided to support it.
For me, that is not enough.
If someone can provide a reason to prohibit same-sex marriage based on, say, a study showing that same-sex couples marrying had an actual negative effect on society, then I would, and we all should, respect that opinion and listen to the argument supporting it.
Until then, however, it would appear that efforts to deny homosexuals the right to marry are bigotry hiding behind the veil of religion – a veil that is often treated as immune to the same logic that dictates the rest of our lives and has been repeatedly used in the past to justify much more severe crimes.
In other words, it is an opinion not worthy of respect.
(02/20/13 3:08pm)
Winsphere Jones’ original production “Thy Kingdom Come”, which premiered at the Douglass Theatre Feb. 8-9, was delightful to experience. The play was a tasteful blend of elements of “Hamlet”, “King Lear” and “Dr. Faustus” set in counterfactual America in the Kingdom of New Amsterdam. Jones evokes the most powerful themes of the Western literary canon: the corrupting influence of power; the nature of sin and judgment; the dichotomy of good and evil; remorse for old sins and reaping what you’ve sown; the biblical struggle between brothers and the quest for the paternal blessing.
Individual performances absolutely exude charisma and emotional dexterity. Jonny Hollingshed, Jr. absolutely stole the show. Hollingshed seems to be an experienced veteran actor, and this really shows up in his performance as King Edward of New Amsterdam, a man grieving from his sinful past as a brutally expansionary monarch. Exhibiting a vivacity that can dominate the entire stage like a monarch in his court, Hollingshed demonstrates his mastery of the whole gauntlet of emotions as his character encounters court intrigue, death and betrayal while his whole world crumbles around him.
The actors C.J. Holston, Jr. and Tim Lee, who play Edward’s sons, Alexander and Victor, complement each other’s performances well. Holton portrays Alexander as the archetypical older brother with the slightly arrogant, womanizing tendencies one might expect in a man who, due to his birthright, has received attention all of his life. In contrast, Tim Lee plays Victor as the archetypical brooding, jealous younger brother who never seems to get what he wants. Victor still grieves his mother’s untimely passing, but now he also laments the loss of his beloved Princess Gwenell, who is betrothed under duress to Alexander. I think anyone familiar with the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, or Jacob and Esau, will know what happens next.
The two servants of the house, a maid named Mary and a butler known as Ebru of the South (pronounced like Hebrew minus the H), are not at all the lowly servants they appear to be. Bohdana Conyers displays a solemnity and gravity appropriate for Mary, whose history is one of tragedy, bloodshed and death. Not only does she hold a secret with grave implications for everyone she knows, but her devotion and love for Prince Victor spells doom for many other characters. In startling contrast to Mary is Ebru (performed by the delightfully devious Ronnie Murphy), an affable, gregarious butler who tends to remain in the background. His friendly façade is only an illusion; he keenly interposes himself as Victor’s and Mary’s advisor, leading them onward to their inevitable fate. Something about the way the light falls on Murphey’s face when he plays Ebru gives him a convincingly diabolical look.
The other actresses deserve just as much praise. Kuan-Yin Coleman as Contessa, Sonya Heilig as Princess Gwenell, Barbara Walker as Queen Isabella and Teia Roberts as Queen Victoria each gave fantastic and believable performances, each with Victorian charm and grace. I would love to see a revival of this cast sometime.
“Thy Kingdom Come” is an incredible drama that can engage a contemporary audience with some of the oldest themes of the Western tradition. If you have the chance to see a production of this play, or any of Winsphere Jones’ productions, I heartily recommend it.
(01/23/13 4:00pm)
The historic Douglass Theatre on Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard has a lot to offer Mercer’s student body. Founded in 1911 by Charles Henry Douglass, a wealthy African-American businessman and patron of the arts, the theatre began its career presenting films and hosting jazz and blues performances. The theatre remained a cultural Mecca for Macon’s African-American community before it closed in the ’70s. Following its restoration in 1997, the Douglass has employed an incredibly diverse arsenal of multicultural activities and events, including films, live musical and theatrical performances and operas. This semester there are several notable events and opportunities for students interested in film and the fine arts.
The Douglass will be hosting the College Town Film Series at 7 p.m. every Thursday night from Jan. 17 through Feb. 7. This year’s line-up looks particularly awesome: “Flash Gordon” (1980) on Jan. 24, “Frozen River” (2008) on Jan. 31, and “Moonrise Kingdom” (2012) on Feb. 7. A brief faculty-led discussion will precede each of these films. Don’t worry; there probably won’t be a test.
For the more theatrically oriented Mercerian, the Douglass is presenting an original production by Winsphere Jones called “Thy Kingdom Come”. This counterfactual drama takes place in an alternate 19th-century America as King Edward of New Amsterdam decides which of his sons will assume his throne. Drawn partly from the biblical stories of Cain and Abel, this work will explore themes of evil, redemption and the pursuit of power. “Thy Kingdom Come” runs Feb. 8-9 at 7:30 p.m.
For my fellow classicists here at Mercer, the Douglass streams live opera from the Metropolitan Opera House in New York. Typically these Met events feature a speaker who delivers a brief analysis of each opera before the show begins so the viewer has a brief understanding of the cultural significance of each work. There are three operas on the schedule for this semester. On March 2 will be Wagner’s “Parsifal”, based on the Arthurian legend surrounding Sir Percival and his quest for the Holy Grail. On March 16 is Zandonai’s “Francesca da Rimini”, which depicts the tragic circumstances of the titular historical figure. On April 27 is Handel’s “Giulio Cesare in Egitto”, which dramatizes Julius Caesar’s activities in Egypt and his romance with the beautiful Cleopatra.
Finally, the Douglass Theatre will participate in the eighth Macon Film Festival on Feb. 14-17, where it will screen films in partnership with the Cox Capitol Theatre and the Grand Opera House. Originally started in 2005, the Macon Film Festival celebrates the works of independent filmmakers for the edification and viewing pleasure of locals in Macon and Central Georgia. Since one can choose to purchase a $10 daily pass or an all-access pass, college students can have the opportunity to spend a whole weekend watching movies with friends or family. This is a great option for students on a budget.
I have to admit that I am still a new patron of the Douglass. Nevertheless, I’ve come to love the Douglass Theatre for its nostalgic atmosphere, its antiquarian appeal, and its continued commitment to provide patrons with excellent entertainment opportunities. Take my word for it: if you are a high-brow classicist, a theater geek, a movie buff or even a college student wanting to fulfill an out-of-class assignment, the Douglass offers many events and opportunities to satiate your culturally famished soul. In an age of globalism, sensory overload and sociopolitical uncertainty, it is comforting to know that there are still such places in the world to seek solace from the exasperations of modernity through cultural expression and the fine arts.