Gilbert & Sullivan Company Decides It Will Branch Out

When the San Diego Gilbert & Sullivan Company ends its 11th season with “The Gondoliers,” March 30 through April 8 at the Casa Del Prado Theatre in Balboa Park, it will also be doffing its name and ending an era.

The company will be reborn as the San Diego Comic Opera Company.

And just what’s in that name? Plenty.

Leon Natker, chosen as the company’s artistic director last year, said the new name will reflect a new repertoire for the organization. The company will branch out with a variety of old and new musical theater and small opera offerings in its three- to four-play seasons.

The first show of the 1990-1991 season will be “The Beggar’s Opera” by John Gay, opening Sept. 14 at the Casa Del Prado. The other shows, with specific dates to be announced, will be a concert celebrating the 75th anniversary of Balboa Park with music of 1915, including selections from John Philip Sousa, George M. Cohan and Gilbert and Sullivan in October; “Rose Marie,” composed by Rudolf Friml with book and lyrics by Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, in March or April, and “H.M.S. Pinafore,” by Gilbert and Sullivan, in June.

Part of the reason for changing the focus of the organization is that the restrictions of a limited repertoire are catching up with the company.

“How long can you support a theater that keeps recycling a dozen pieces?” Natker asked. “After we ran through the entire G&S; repertoire in the first five years, subscriptions took a dramatic 40% dive. We’ve never really built back. When Holly (Hollace Koman, founder and first artistic director of the company) started, she had wonderful casts. That changed when she could no longer afford to pay her artists as much and they were tired of doing the same thing over and over again.”

The San Diego Comic Opera Company will still produce at least one Gilbert and Sullivan operetta a year, Natker promised. But don’t be surprised if even that opera is not what it used to be.

“The Gondoliers,” directed by Natker, will be set in modern Venice. Natker’s aim is to play up the political satire in Gilbert’s tirade about the extremists of democracy fighting the extremists of monarchy, without a single sensible voice among them.

“What we’re trying to do is find parallels in our own era,” Natker said. “The political points are salient. It’s all about little islands like Grenada and the Falklands, about dictatorships and colonialism. I want people to go away from this not only being entertained, but thinking about something as well. That was Gilbert’s objective.”

Also among Natker’s objectives is to offer surprise where the San Diego Gilbert & Sullivan Company once promised predictability.

By presenting rarely seen, small-scale productions of works by Offenbach, early Jerome Kern and Cohan, as well as small chamber musicals and small commissioned pieces, Natker hopes to attract the growing San Diego audiences that have come to expect new and experimental works from leading local theaters, especially in the past six or seven years.

The theater has a balanced budget now, after battling a deficit for the past four to five years, Natker said. But that can change quickly.

“I have to compete with all these theaters,” Natker said. “I have to say, ‘Come spend your theater dollars with me and not with them.’ I’ve got to offer a new audience something new to see. I know I’ve already offended some of the people on the church-singing circuit who have nice voices but are not actors. But if we don’t change, we’re going away. We’re in a make-or-break situation. Either the company goes into the 1990s or it closes its doors.”