Gilbert & Sullivan, Still Turning Things ‘Topsy-Turvy’

“During the last few weeks, there has been no busier man in all of London than Sir Arthur Sullivan,” a reporter wrote breathlessly on Dec. 5, 1889, about the composer half of the operetta team of Gilbert & Sullivan. Sullivan, who was juggling projects--like the just-about-to-open “The Gondoliers”--told the reporter he had only a minute to talk, then entertained the reporter with stories and anecdotes for two hours.

Into the 21st century, Sir William Schwenk Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s career is again hopping. Since 1990, more recordings of the team’s 14 operettas have been issued than during the 40 years after World War II. There are about 225 societies in the U.S. and Canada alone devoted exclusively to Gilbert & Sullivan, and at least 75 theater groups regularly performing the light operas in North America.

Four publishing houses in England and the U.S. are competing to produce scholarly, authoritative editions of Gilbert & Sullivan--works once considered too lightweight for academic consideration. And all of this was before “Topsy-Turvy.”

Mike Leigh’s acclaimed musical film biography about the British writer-composer team, which opens nationally this month after a limited release in Los Angeles and New York in December, has already swept both the New York Film Critics and National Society of Film Critics as best picture. It was on virtually every major critic’s Top 10 list for 1999.

“Topsy-Turvy” appears likely to precipitate a Gilbert & Sullivan revival dwarfing the previous groundswell after theater impresario Joseph Papp restaged “Pirates of Penzance” in Central Park in 1980. Since mid-century Gilbert & Sullivan’s cachet has fallen, especially among baby boomers, as old-hat arch purveyors of creaky operetta, but a critical and scholarly redemption is underway.

“They are the big daddies really, the founding fathers of the modern musical,” says Leigh, a self-professed fan. “Everybody from Rodgers & Hammerstein to the Gershwins, Lerner & Loewe and everyone else, Johnny Mercer not least, claimed them as their influence, as their gurus.”

And, ironically, “HMS Pinafore,” the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta about the unusual crew of a British ship, is credited with inspiring that most indigenous of American art forms, the musical play.

“ ‘Pinafore’ hit the U.S. with huge force in 1878 and became an even larger phenomenon here than in England,” says Bruce Miller, a Gilbert & Sullivan expert who teaches at Holy Cross College in Massachusetts. “The two-act form, the integration of music and dialogue, caught people’s fancy.”

In fact, the success of “Pinafore” pushed Gilbert & Sullivan to sail to America to mount their own productions. “So much money was being made here, and they were annoyed that they weren’t seeing any of it because there wasn’t a copyright agreement between the States and England,” says Miller. “So they came here to produce their next opera, ‘Pirates of Penzance,’ hoping to conquer the market before Americans had the chance to pirate it themselves, if you’ll excuse the pun.”

‘Succulent’ Music and Social Criticism

What’s the draw of Gilbert & Sullivan music to an earthy filmmaker like Leigh, whose gritty films include “Naked” and “Secrets and Lies”?

“It’s sexy,” says Leigh, who hastens to add, “though you can’t take that too literally. The music is succulent, sensual. What people call the tingle factor. It sends a tingle up the spine.”

Lyricist Gilbert was the Mark Twain or Charles Dickens of his world, according to Marc Shepherd, who archives the Gilbert & Sullivan discography on the Internet.

“Gilbert was an extraordinarily funny and clever lyricist, and had an ability to make fun with the English language,” Shepherd says. “He was also a social critic. He criticized the class system, people who are in positions of authority but incompetent or hypocritical. These are things which happen in all periods and in all countries, so the operas never go out of style.”

The potency of the Gilbert & Sullivan name was evident in April when Miller held a press conference to announce the recovery of a “lost” Gilbert & Sullivan song, “Reflect, My Child,” from “HMS Pinafore.” It attracted worldwide media coverage.

“I was just floored. The day I made the announcement, I was on the phone with the Associated Press, the New York Times, U.S. News and World Report, NPR and the BBC. It was heartening to realize that Gilbert & Sullivan are still a cultural icon,” says Miller, who is also on the editorial board for critical editions at the Broude Brothers publishing house, which is releasing its “HMS Pinafore” this spring.

“Gilbert & Sullivan is very much alive and well and thriving,” says David Bamberger, artistic director of Cleveland Opera, which gave the North American premiere of the recovered number in its production of “HMS Pinafore” last November, which sold out all 12,000 seats. “If you look at the number of producing organizations and societies worldwide, it’s staggering.”

The mercurial mixture of lunacy and weightiness is what makes Gilbert & Sullivan’s work survive, says Bamberger. “If you swing in one direction to seriousness, you’ll swing in equal proportion to lunacy. There aren’t any gray spots,” he says. “In ‘Pinafore,’ you have high drama to complete insanity. That dimensionality and richness make the funnier stuff even funnier. Gilbert & Sullivan have this wonderful pacing and create this whole ride.”

Other recent markers signal a Gilbert & Sullivan renaissance. An international festival devoted exclusively to the Victoria-era team was launched in Buxton, England, in 1994, and has since grown to an 18-day festival. The following year, the tony Covent Garden Royal Opera House in London performed Gilbert & Sullivan for the first time in its history.

The cycle for a Gilbert & Sullivan revival is on target, say experts.

“There seems to be this 20-year phenomenon,” says Miller. “Whenever you think they’ve gone out of fashion, something comes along and they’re back again. The operettas were written in a 20-year period, roughly 1875 to 1895. And the first big London revival started about 1906, when Gilbert started to revive the famous ones.”

The Shows Have Never, Really, Gone Out of Style

After World War I, Rupert D’Oyly Carte, the son of the original impresario, revived the operas in London, to great success. In 1939, the British filmmakers, the Kordas, produced a Technicolor film version of “The Mikado,” which spurred new interest. (The creation of “The Mikado” is at the center of “Topsy-Turvy.”) And when the British copyright on Gilbert & Sullivan expired in 1961, “there was suddenly a wave of new productions which didn’t owe anything to the D’Oyly Carte,” says Miller. The successful Papp revival of “Pirates” was transferred to Broadway, then made into a film starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt.

But Leigh says his goal is not to redeem Gilbert & Sullivan. “I’m not really in the business of proselytizing; [I’m] not spearheading a movement to see them taken seriously. I think they wind up sitting where they naturally wind up sitting,” says the filmmaker. “Sullivan wanted to be Mozart, but it’s not Mozart. Nothing in all of their 14 operas is ‘Cosi fan tutte.’ Never will be.” Leigh was drawn to Gilbert & Sullivan for a multitude of reasons, including the complex relationship of the men and their working style, as well as an appreciation for the Victorian era in which they lived.

“Sullivan had profound aspirations, but he was also this bon vivant, lived the good life, and bubbling with good humor. There was Gilbert, who wrote this comic, escapist, topsy-turvy nonsense, but was dour, complex, tortured,” Leigh explains. “You have these personalities, and also the fact that they worked together but didn’t particularly get on. At times, indeed, they worked together in a very remote control kind of way.”

Mostly, Leigh says he wanted to capture the blood, sweat, tears and passion of the creative process, through the prism of Gilbert & Sullivan.

“I wanted to do a film about what we do. We who go to hell and back, worrying ourselves sick, taking seriously the job of entertaining and amusing. I wanted to deal with that in a movie,” he says. “And Gilbert & Sullivan has been kind of degenerated and marginalized by the moth-eaten bad productions. I said, ‘Let’s look at their world, fair and square, give them some space, give a bit of life back into it.’ ”

Did it work? Leigh smiles as he describes his hip, young aide in England, as well as the tough film crew on “Topsy-Turvy”: “I’ve got an assistant in London, kind of a laid-back, movie-assistant kind of person. Now I hear her singing snatches of Gilbert & Sullivan.” He adds: “And when we were filming, weeks into the shoot, there were the grips, these guys walking around, and they were singing extracts from songs we’d shot weeks before. It was great to see these young people, and everybody else for that matter, really getting into it, really enjoying Gilbert & Sullivan in fresh terms, as something that is kind of alive.”