#iolanthe

We learn all this through a (pre-recorded) ‘BBC 4’ broadcast playing from a wireless speaker set up by Mr. Charles Martin, who appears well before the lights in the guise of an ordinary stagehand: shifting costume racks, dust-mopping the stage, and conducting other vague duties as the audience settles in. He pauses only to give the pre-show announcements before returning to his business... wholly unaware of Ms. Rose Waldman’s Iolanthe, who slips onstage in a rolling open-faced cabinet, wrapped in a heavy brown coat. Minutes later, as the overture’s tempo picks up, the whole fairy troop suddenly pours in from the aisles and the theater entrance. They eagerly claim the space for themselves, bully Mr. Martin into the red soldier’s coat and character of Willis, and we’re off to the races.

Lest I fall to recounting the entire show beat by beat, I’ll instead review the cast in rough order of appearance.

I last saw Mr. Martin in the role of Poobà in Lamplighters’ Il Ducato (2023), and I enjoyed his work very much then. As Willis, he benefits enormously from this new spin on a character who originally only appears in the second act of the show. Wardrobe change aside, he remains a stagehand, and is thus able to wander in and out of the action throughout. He guides choristers back into place when they misstep; he brings props and furniture on and off as required, mainly for the benefit of the mortal half of the cast. He’s an unassuming, humble fellow who takes the increasingly wild shenanigans around him with good grace. Though he’d really prefer to keep his head down and seems taken aback when prompted to start his only aria, “When all night long a chap remains,” he proceeds to sing it with a sense of whimsy that he might just be discovering in that moment. It’s a beautiful thing to see.

The fairy band, for their part, intrigued me even as I read the program beforehand: all eight fairies were credited with names they appear to have chosen themselves- and chosen from the entire G&S canon to boot. (One among them, Rachel Aquilina, has decided on Perola... which was the name of our title character herself until Gilbert changed it fairly late in the original rehearsal process.) From their first entrance to their last note, they are a captivating bunch—delighting us with their giddy whims, amusing us with their blunt expressions, and altogether wreaking merry havoc as they please. This is reinforced by their costumes, which give the impression that the wearers have raided every costume dungeon, Renaissance Faire and obscure boutique they could find to deck themselves with all the pretty things they could lay hands on. Best of all, the solo lines originally confined to but three fairies are now split fairly evenly among the entire troop. It gives them each a chance to shine and makes them seem like a proper group of friends.

Ms. Sonia Gariaeff is a dab hand at portraying regal ladies; I last saw her as Juno in Pocket Opera’s Orpheus in the Underworld (2023). As the Fairy Queen, she uses her most distinct diction and sonorous tones to great effect. Her Majesty would like to be the dignified leader of her court; yet, being a fairy, she is consumed “down to the feet” by each successive emotion from moment to moment. Ms. Gariaeff looks most elegant in her costume, with a crown of metallic twigs sitting jauntily on her head and velvety black heels enhancing her already willowy height below a gleaming gold-&-purple gown (topped off, of course, with sizable purple wings bobbing and swaying at the shoulders). More importantly, however, she renders her lines with relish and gusto enough to cheer the weariest heart. I have two favorite parts of her performance: her speech in the first scene about all the things Iolanthe taught her, and the sheer force of her attraction to Willis in the second act. All her fine words in “Oh, foolish fay” and its preceding dialogue are hilariously belied by the voracity with which she eats the proverbial eye candy.

Although she is the title character, Iolanthe as originally written can sometimes run the risk of being overshadowed by the other characters. In this production, there’s no danger of that: like Willis, Ms. Waldman joins in on many scenes that the libretto does not explicitly grant her, and her face (framed by a wig of softly waving brown curls) speaks volumes even when her lips do not. Her one-shouldered teal-blue goddess gown and smaller wings put me in mind of classical depictions of Psyche; we can readily believe in her eternal youth. Better yet, however, she has made the role entirely her own in a way I didn’t expect—she never lets us forget that Iolanthe is a mother.

For twenty-five years, forbidden from the company of both her fairy sisters and her mortal beloved, Iolanthe’s one anchor to the world has been her son. Ms. Waldman bears this well in mind and carries it into almost all her spoken lines, imbuing them with fond pride, frank pragmatism, or stalwart reassurance as appropriate. But mind that I say ‘almost.’ Though she cannot interact with him for most of the show on pain of execution, Ms. Waldman fluently portrays Iolanthe’s struggle between the longing for her estranged spouse and the need to preserve her own life. There is a poignant staging moment in the first-act finale: having narrowly escaped identification by said spouse, she reenters (under the protection of a sign around her neck reading ‘invisible’) and gazes at him in silent agony, so close and yet so far. I need hardly add that when she pled her boy’s case in the second-act aria “He loves,” ‘veiled’ by strategic shadows and the radiance of the ghost light, she quite reduced me to tears.

This brings us to the boy himself, Strephon, who together with his sweetheart Phyllis is written as a ruthless spoof of a contemporary trope: the Arcadian shepherd and shepherdess, living charmed lives in the idyllic countryside, and usually resembling nothing so much as walking mantelpiece statuettes. Given the aforementioned framing device, Mr. Zoldan discards this tradition. He has instead reimagined the young lovers as two street artists fresh out of school- whose favorite artistic motif happens to be sheep.

Thus, while retaining the titles of shepherd and Ward in Chancery, Mr. Matt Skinner and Mr. Ash Hurtado are set free to create one of the sweetest, most convincing couples I’ve yet seen in a G&S performance. From their very first scene, they establish such a strong rapport as to bring the audience wholeheartedly round to their side. We want nothing more than for these crazy kids to get their happily ever after toute de suite.

We meet Mr. Skinner’s Strephon first. He proves to be full of vigor, good heart, and just a touch of pettiness in the role, admirably succeeding both as ardent paramour and caring son. I much admired his illustrative Dick-van-Dyke-esque antics when he explained to his aunts all the woes of being only half a fairy, as well as the deft way in which he rattled off his argument to the Lord Chancellor- one of the purplest speeches Gilbert ever wrote. (For a bonus, he even appears during the “Nightmare Song”, sporting a truly demonic grin as the attorney of the fourth verse.)*

Minutes later we are introduced to Phyllis, who in Mr. Hurtado’s hands is everything a modern audience** could possibly wish for. His playful “Phyl” (as she is frequently addressed by her sweetheart) is no porcelain figurine, but a real person; though she has a tendency to tease her “simple swain,” she does it with such clear affection that it only makes him (and us) love her more. This in turn heightens the tour de force Mr. Hurtado makes of the act-I finale: he brings out every beat of the character’s emotions, spiraling up from the depths of crestfallen heartbreak to the heights of blinding fury. His eyes burn like twin stars as Phyl declares she does not care which of her two noble suitors she marries, and angrily adorns herself with every last bauble offered to her by the entire House of Lords. Nor does Hurtado flag in the second act, giving us a quieter but no less sharp depiction of Phyl’s mental state (in short, Not Good) in the scenes leading up to the lovers’ eventual reconciliation, which comes as a great relief.

One more thing about the street-artist angle on these characters: it goes a long way toward softening the lyrics of their first duet, which features a string of images that all seem to position Phyllis as a smaller or lesser part of Strephon; the performers’ top-notch acting takes care of the rest. And in Mr. Hurtado’s case, this is more than an aesthetic: he himself created all the paintings and sketches we see onstage, largely featuring not just sheep but black sheep—which strikes me in retrospect as a subtle visual reference to Iolanthe’s former outcast state.

The said noble suitors, the Earls Tolloller and Mountararat, are played with apt aplomb by Mr. Jacob Bronson and Mr. John Melis respectively. They are also given the priceless gift of delivering some of the most deftly updated jokes in the entire show. (I fear I must apologize for the involuntary, unholy noise I made upon hearing the phrase “Parliamentary Costco.”) Between Bronson’s unctuous inflections and Melis’s pompous self-importance, the roles are well done indeed. Special mention must further be made of their scene with Phyllis in act II, where they arrive bearing such generic gifts that it’s obvious they neither truly know nor genuinely care for her at all. For each other, however, they have all the regard in the world- and, in Tolloller’s case, even a little more, as Phyl interestedly observes.

Their fellow Peers are a well-heeled yet hapless bunch, robustly sung, and united in but two things: their infatuation with Phyllis and their upper-class snobbery. This is clear from their entrance number alone, as the eight of them perform Jayne Zaban’s cleverly choreographed steps complete with multiple “errors.” I appreciated the fact that this House contains two female MPs, which is a nice touch of realism. It also allows for a most satisfying moment in act II, when Mountararat’s complaint about women interfering in politics is soundly shouted down by every other cast member onstage. Other highlights include: a) the eerie bit at the end of “Spurn not the nobly born,” in which they all simultaneously intone Phyllis’s name while holding out their offerings of jewels; b) their goggle-eyed dismay as they softly exclaim, “We never knew / we were talking to / an influential Fairy!”

Last but certainly not least among the principals, we have Mr. Chris Uzelac as the Lord Chancellor. Despite the ominous melodic motif and red lighting that greets his initial entrance, he soon shows us that the LC is not really a bad sort. He’s affable, self-deprecating, and firmly dedicated to the Law, refusing to seriously entertain his own small tendre for Phyllis on ethical grounds (at least until the Earls egg him into making one final legal address to himself on the subject***). There is perhaps a tendency among G&S aficionados to regard the obligatory comic baritone characters as inherently hypocritical, but I don’t believe the Chancellor is any such hypocrite, and happily Mr. Uzelac doesn’t seem to either.

Case in point: his performance throughout the scene of Iolanthe’s plea in late act II. The instant he hears her voice, Mr. Uzelac’s whole being focuses to a single point- why does this woman sound so familiar? He’s haunted, trying repeatedly to peer past the ghost light's glow, though she counters his every move. As she invokes the memory of his long-lost bride, he becomes so moved that he brings his hand up to kiss his wedding ring with silent sobs. He’s genuinely remorseful to admit the fact of his new engagement—and when he’s finally permitted to see that she is the very bride he thought dead all these years, he goes from rooted shock to frantic relief as he embraces her once more. In short, he answered my every hope in this single scene.

All in all, Lamplighters’ fresh take on Iolanthe is the most wonderful two and a half hours I’ve spent in a theater for some months- if not years. I’m going back on this coming Saturday, and I absolutely cannot wait. Bravi, bravi, bravissimi to one and all!