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PATIENCE
June 13,14,20,21, 2008 8:00 pm
June 15*& 22, 2008 2:00
Cast
- PATIENCE (A Dairy Maid) - Stacey Mastrian
- THE LADY ANGELA - Patricia Portillo
- THE LADY SAPHIR - Wanda Flinn
- THE LADY ELLA - Gayle Gillespie
- THE LADY JANE - Melissa Kornacki
- REGINALD BUNTHORNE (A Fleshly Poet) - Gary Sullivan
- ARCHIBALD GROSVENOR (An Idyllic Poet) - Harv Lester
- COLONEL CALVERLEY - Tom Goode
- MAJOR MURGATROYD - Blair Eig
- LIEUT. THE DUKE OF DUNSTABLE -Pablo Zylberglait
Chorus of RAPTUROUS MAIDENS and OFFICERS OF DRAGOON GUARDS: David Bradley, Grace Brigham, Katie Caughlan, Alex Desjardins, Rick DuPuy, Noah Friedlander, Stefanie Garcia, Annie Gribbin, Dardi Harrison, Lucy Hellerman, Rand Huntzinger, Donna Jaffe, Lyle Jaffe, Carlton Maryott, Jane Maryott, Jim Noone, Pamela Sears-Rogan, Madeleine Smith, Julie Stevens, Ed Vilade, Clyde Wright, Ann Yu
Production Team
- DIRECTOR - Guilllaume Tourniaire
- MUSIC DIRECTOR - Joseph Sorge
- PRODUCER - Denise Young
- ASST MUSIC DIRECTOR - Jenny Bland
- STAGE MANAGER/CHOREOGRAPHER - Felicity Ann Brown
- SET DESIGNER - David Kaysen
- MAKEUP/HAIR DESIGNER - Renee Silverstone
Synopsis
ACT I The opening scene is laid at "Castle Bunthorne," where Bunthorne, aesthetic poet, is explaining to twenty love sick maidens the mysteries of love, which, he asserts, can be cured by proper medical treatment. They listen to him with adoration, but he remains insensible to their passion. He loves Patience, they declare.
Patience, a simple dairy maid, has never loved anyone except an aunt, and learns that true love must be "utter unselfishness." The previous year the officers of a regiment of Dragoon Guards, whose colonel now introduces himself and them in a rollicking, boastful song, has been much beloved by the twenty maidens, but now they are accorded a different welcome. Bunthorne has "idealised them" and "their eyes are opened." When alone, he admits being a sham - only feigning aestheticism to gain admiration.
Patience remembers a boy who was her child-companion, and when Archibald Grosvenor appears she discovers it is he. They love each other, but Patience, in the belief that true love is "utter unselfishness," thinks she cannot marry one so perfect.
Bunthorne, returning, has decided to put himself up to be raffled for, and just as the lot is to be drawn, Patience in her "utter unselfishness" says that she will marry him because "she detests him so."
The disappointed maidens then return to the Dragoons, but when they see Archibald Grosvenor, immediately transfer their affections to him because "he is aesthetic!" Bunthorne is jealous, and the Dragoons disgusted.
ACT II
A "Rural Glade." The unattractive Jane bewails the lot of maidens who have been in that state too long. Grosvenor is now adored by all the maidens. He is somewhat annoyed by their attentions for they have followed him since Monday. He pleads for "the usual half holiday on Saturday." Patience, meanwhile, muses upon love. Bunthorne, deserted and consumed by jealousy, has still one faithful admirer - the portly Lady Jane, whose charms decrease as her size increases. She implores him not to wait too long, but Bunthorne is determined to beat Grosvenor on his own ground.
At last the rival poets meet. Bunthorne threatens to "curse" Archibald unless he consents to cut his hair and become quite commonplace. Grosvenor outwardly appalled, but secretly relieved, consents to become an "every day young man".
Now that Bunthorne is happy, Patience, in her "utter unselfishness," breaks her engagement. Upon Archibald Grosvenor's return, in a tweed suit, she realizes that since he is now a commonplace young man, she can marry him.
Bunthorne finds that the twenty love sick maidens have returned to their soldier lovers. He then decides to console himself with the portly Lady Jane. But the Duke of Dunstable, desirous of marrying a plain woman, has already claimed Lady Jane, so Bunthorne is left without a bride!
[Plot summary from the book The Victor Book of the Opera, RCA Manufacturing Co., Camden, NJ, 1936.]
Director's Notes
From stage director Guillaume Tourniaire:
“Parody is by its nature ephemeral. It relies on recognition, and the specific objects of parody seldom have lasting recognition. In 1881, when George Grossmith played Bunthorne wearing an eyeglass like Swinburne’s, a lily like Wilde’s, and a silver streak in his hair like Whistler’s, he entered to a prolonged ovation; in the 1970’s, a similarly made-up John Reed got only mild chuckles at his eccentric appearance. Parody doesn’t last, and Patience is no exception.” A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan by Gayden Wren
In changing midstream from a play about two rival curates to one about two rival poets (and leaving some traces of the earlier work along the way), Gilbert aimed his skewering pen at the overblown figures and followers of the aesthetic movement of the day. While this made the operetta all the more popular for its timeliness, it did create a problem for later productions. For starters, the purists out there can breathe a sigh of relief: I did not choose to update the play, setting it in the era of Flower Power or in a modern-day spa.
By the same token, however, I also chose not to include the affected poses that are such a well-known part of Patience, but seem anachronistic to the uninitiated. I felt that including the traditional aesthetic poses for their own sake of would be a bit like telling a private joke for only part of the audience, or a public joke that requires an explanation – one seems rude, and the other simply isn’t funny. Instead, the cast and I have taken great delight in interpreting for ourselves the sparkling dialogue and music that make the operetta such a pleasure to revisit. Our goal was to offer a Patience that would make sense to an audience seeing it for the first time.
As an American opera company presenting an emblematically British art form, we drew inspiration from Whistler’s contemporary, Thomas Wilmer Dewing, whose works hang in the Smithsonian’s American Art Museum and Freer Gallery. Dewing’s Tonalist paintings were the American nod to English aestheticism, and were praised for their reminiscence of Botticelli. My first image of Lady Jane was his Lady Playing the Violoncello (1908). The backdrop of the stage is an homage to his Summer (1890), and the ladies’ aesthetic garb pick up the drape and hues of this and other paintings in the season series. The set resembles the setting in his In the Garden (1894), and the lighting attempts to capture the suffusion of color in his backdrops, out of which his figures seem to grow in The Lute (1904).
In several of his books, Gilbert wrote about the quest to know what love is; also, that clothes do not make the man. To me, Patience in this regard is chiefly about selflessness: selflessness as the loss of identity in a regimented organization or wholly engrossing movement; selflessness as the abandonment of individuality in the pursuit of an ideal or single-minded goal; as well as the selflessness of giving oneself freely for love. Some characters in the play give up their ego for the uniform of a soldier or the cause of a poet; others embrace and espouse aestheticism as one might a philosophy or religion. Although Patience herself professes that she “cannot tell what this love may be,” she seems surer of her own self than the interchangeable ladies, dragoons, and poets.