How daring of the Riverdale High School drama club to be staging a Tarzan drama 25 years before the Disney Broadway version. This story appears in Archie Giant Series Magazine #504, March 1981. The animated Disney movie which begat the Broadway show was released in 1999. There is a Tarzan stage legacy dating back to the early 1920s, nine years after Edgar Rice Burroughs’ first Tarzan novel was published.

The live Tarzan show which was created nearest to this Archie portrayal was probably T. Zee, a rock musical by Richard O’Brien of Rocky Horror Show fame. Like we say, daring.

Joey Fly Private Eye 2 in Big Hairy Drama
Written by Aaron Reynolds, illustrated by Neil Numberman. Henry Holt & Co., 2010)
Insect noir adventure in which a private eye who has the compound eyes of a fly and who is a magnet for atrocious puns (“I do believe your fly is down.” “So I was.”) solves a crime in an old playhouse. The plot hinges on quaint theatrical superstitions and devices, and comes off pretty knowledgeable about the field. At 128 pages and averaging seven cartoon panels to a page, this is pretty dense for a kid’s graphic novel. So don’t share it with them. (My own daughters, who are 7 and 9 and widely read, found it “creepy”). A good gift for theater pests of most any other age.

BBC Radio 4 Extra is currently broadcasting a new radio dramatization of Karel Capek’s War With the Newts. You can listen to it on demand, for free, for the rest of this week, here.

In the theater, Capek’s known for his social-satire fantasy classic R.U.R. (for which the playwright coined the now-standard term “robot”) and The Insect Play.
I’ve seen both these plays done by small theaters in New Haven—R.U.R. by Michael Colavolpe’s TheatreMania company sometime in the 1990s and Insect Play smartly adapted by Steve Bellwood for the Jackdaw Pike troupe sometime in the 2000s. I also have powerful memories of a lush, stinging production of Insect Play directed by Laurence Senelick over 40 years ago at Tufts University.
Capek sticks with you a while. He was so ahead of his time that it seems impossible that he’s now been dead for over 70 years. Outspoken and progressive, he was an early member of International PEN and served Czechoslavakia as a political journalist and speechwriter.
His theater legacy is one thing—even if Capek hadn’t written those allegorical fantasies he’d be revered for his bold anti-fascist dramas The Mother and White Disease (aka Power and Glory) which spoke up against the insurgent Nazi party in the 1930s.
But he’s got a whole other literary reputation: as a novelist, a spinner of folktales, a travel writer and a short story writer with a knack for mysteries.
Science fiction fans know Karel Capek as one of the pioneers of that genre, thanks largely due to War With the Newts, which was kind of the Planet of the Apes of its time. The book isn’t easily stageable, due to the amphibians it requires (though I guess that didn’t stop Albee from writing Seascape). But it makes for a dandy large-cast radio suspense drama. The BBC production scurries as swiftly as one of its titular salamanders, but also pauses to make sure you realize this is a metaphor for how the world felt and behaved in the years leading up to World War Two.
Several Capek plays are ripe for revival, and several of his novels and story collections scream out for adaptations. Hint, hint.

Church

Through Nov. 5 at the Yale Cabaret, 217 Park St., New Haven. Written by Young Jean Lee. Performed by Matthew Lotschic, Laura Gragtmans, Kate Attwell and others. Directed by the ensemble, with Sunder Ganglani. Sound: en Goodwin. Lights: Masha Tsimring. Choreography by the female members of the cast plus Mary Laws and Sunder Ganglani.

I come late to the Young Jean Lee party. I know she’s been a hot theater talent for a decade now, and I’ve read about her in American Theatre and elsewhere, and that she has an Obie and a 2011 Googenheim Fellowship. But I hadn’t been exposed to her work yet.

I’m rather stunned, for two reasons. One, for a modern experimental playwright of renown, Church is remarkably low-key. Two, the play’s mood fits in so well with what’s been going on at the Cabaret so far this season that it could have written for the space, (It was commissioned five years ago by New York’s P.S. 122 and other theaters.)

Church is not only not showy, it’s not showy about its subject, evangelical Christianity. It doesn’t overtly mock or mangle or upbraid the concept of faith. It explores it in about as delicate a manner as you could wish for while still being a provocative theater.

Church openly structures itself around group-worship conventions such as prayer requests (in which audience members share sincere prayers) and long confessions of the revelations that brought them to Christ. You keep waiting for the other shoe (or show) to drop, but the play is not forcing any issues. It’s as honest and evenhanded an exploration of such a loaded subject as one could hope for, imbued with laughter, beauty and serenity while remaining admirably distanced and a tad skeptical.

The performers, who use their own names as “Reverends” of the church which they say the Yale Cabaret has generously given them the room to emote about, are given a lot of leeway to tune Church into a naturalistic, informal, familiar and interactive experience. Mostly, they proselytize and move exuberantly around the sparse space. But what really makes Church different from, you know, church, is the audience’s participation. Even if you buy in to premise, and commit to these performers and their vows and (occasionally outlandish) stories, you are in a theater context and thus have license to laugh, grunt, drink and do other things you would avoid doing in an actual place of worship.

Church fits in snugly with many of the Cabaret offerings this year. There’s been an emphasis on new ways of seeing and feeling theater. Boundaries have consistently been tested regarding the need for narrative, the amount of physical movement required, dance as a pivotal component of theater, and matter-of-fact delivery that suggests reality more than performance. Church might have been planned as a culmination of some of these ongoing experiments, but in fact it was a last-minute addition to the Cabaret sched, replacing the new work Paul & Tim Fight a Bear (which was scuttled due to a school-based scheduling conflict of one of its creative team).

Church is a meditation which I’m surprised to see works so well as open discourse. The reserve, reverence and genuine good-spiritness of the cast—which includes current Cabaret co-artistic director Kate Attwell and Managing Director Matthew Gutschick—certainly helps. But so does an audience that’s already been primed for such nuanced reflection by recent shows such as Rey Planta, Persona (which featured Laura Gragtmans, who resurfaces here), Creation 2011 and hundredyearspaceship (in which two of Church’s cast appeared).

Two more shows left in the Cabaret semester. I’m a devoted follower, and Church has helped me understand why.

Debra Walton, Cynthia Thomas, Doug Eskew, Kecia Lewis-Evans and pianist/musical director Phillip Hall in the Long Wharf Theatre presentation of Ain't Misbehavin'. The show, directed and choreographed by the show's original team of Richard Maltby Jr. and Arthur Faria, misbehaves through Nov. 20. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

Ain’t Misbehavin’—The Fats Waller Musical Show

Through Nov. 20 at the Long Wharf Theatre, 222 Sargent Dr., New Haven. Conceived by Richard Maltby Jr. & Murray Horwitz. Created and originally directed by Richard Maltby Jr. Original choreography and musical staging by Arthur Faria. Musical adaptation, orchestration and arrangement by Luther Henderson. Vocal and musical concepts by Jeffrey Gutcheon. Musical arrangements by Jeffrey Gutcheon and William Elliott.

Directed by Richard Maltby Jr. Choreographed by Arthur Faria. Musical director: Phillip Hall. Set design: John Lee Beatty. Costume design: Gail Baldoni. Lighting design: Pat Collins. Sound design: Tom Morse. Production stage manager: Bonnie Brady. Performed by Eugene Barry-Hill (Andre), Doug Eskew (Ken), Kecia Lewis-Evans (Nell), Cynthia Thomas (Armelia) and Debra Walton (Charlayne).

Occupy Waller Street!

The street is an idealized version of uptown New York City in the 1920s and ‘30s. Ain’t Misbehavin’ at the Long Wharf Theatre is also a return to the brassy Broadways and Off Broadway song revues of the 1960s and ‘70s—when a passel of songs by a Ronnie Graham or a Jacques or, in this case a Fats Waller, was more than enough material with which to fashion an intimate yet exuberant ensemble show.

Nowadays, they write flimsy books around songs from numerous composers and call them jukebox musicals. I prefer box-set musicals like this one, where for variety’s sake the directors and performers are forced to creatively rework.

The Fats Waller catalogue is broad yet thin. He worked in numerous styles as a composer, and gave ingenious renditions of other writers’ material. Yet this massive talent only lived to the age of 39. He’d been gone for three decades when Richard Maltby Jr., Murray Horwitz and Arthur Faria created Ain’t Misbehavin’. Waller’s legacy had largely faded, which gave the show’s nonetheless respectful creative team license to rework the Waller magic for Broadway audiences.

Maltby and Faria are at the helm of this revival, as they have been for numerous revivals and tours of Ain’t Misbehavin’ over the years.

Long Wharf Artistic Director Gordon Edelstein’s proclamations that this production is a return to its roots—namely, the low-budget one-off cabaret revue of Fats Waller songs concocted 35 years ago for the Manhattan Theatre Club—don’t hold water (or Waller). The Long Wharf rendition doesn’t even fully resemble the show’s long-running Broadway version, where the cast’s physiques complemented each other in a more visually arresting manner and where the performers weren’t so coy about coming very close to the audience.

But to duplicate a Broadway, or even a New York cabaret club, experience at a regional theater would be the wrong behavior for Ain’t Misbehavin’.

This joints simply jump differently.

The Long Wharf has had considerable experience now in refitting musicals to the needs of its own (wide-thrust) stage and (suburban white subscriber) audience. Guys and Dolls, Man of La Mancha and Carousel couldn’t have been done at Long Wharf without being downsized, but even an already intimate show like Fantasticks was rethought for more dramatic potential.

In Ain’t Misbehavin’ at the Long Wharf, the big showy numbers such as Spreadin’ Rhythm Around can be overpowering, while most of the solo routines slyly slay you with nuance. Vaudeville staples such as jiggling bosoms and levitating bowler hats can be too broad and comic strippy for this stage, while subtle gestures such as the handing off of a reefer (and the smell of herbal cigarettes which accompanies it) can be deeply affecting. The frantic choreography in some of the ensemble numbers can be a blur, while a sedentary piece like “Black and Blue”—wisely placed after the raucous hoots “Find Out What They Like” and “Fat and Greasy” in order to calm down the room a little—wrench great harmonic feeling with nothing but vocals.

Everyone in this cast has done Ain’t Misbehavin’ elsewhere, four of them in the same 30^th anniversary production in Los Angeles two years ago. For music director and onstage pianist Phillip Hall (who physically resembles Waller, at least as seen from behind while playing the piano), this is his ninth production of the show. There’s comfort in the company’s familiarity with each other, but at times there’s also that clockwork, automatic approach that can feel insincere at such close quarters. These are not perfomers we can expect to modulate their performances. They play big.

Yet it works. How could it not? It has for 30 years. Community theater productions of this show play it equally big. It’s developed its own big style. Ironically, it’s not the style of its inspiration, Fats Waller. When he said “One never knows, do one?,” it was often a murmured aside. His ad-libs and meticulously crafted one-liners could be subtle digs at his colleagues and audiences. They could be personal and precious.

Here, “One never knows…” is an oft-repeated catchphrase, carefully and louded enunciated, on the same level as the main lyrics. Nor is the piano playing as graceful as Fats’.

This is not misbehavior. It’s not wrong. The show is brilliant in how it doesn’t even pretend it is impersonating Fats Waller. Of the cast of three women, two men, pianist Phillip Hall and a six-piece backing band of local jazz players, only Hall can be said to be “doing” Fats, and even then it’s more a visual reference point, not integral to the show.

Phillip Hall, performing in the Fats Waller stride piano style, in Ain't Misbehavin' at the Long Wharf. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

What’s integral to the show is the individual charms and talents of the starring vocal quintet. Eugene Barry-Hill and Doug Eskew dress dapper and only act slick when it’s a set-up for a joke about acting too slick. Kecia Lewis-Evans and Cynthia Thomas nail both the sassy-woman and the spurned-woman numbers. Debra Walton has the same pipsqueak impact as the littlest girl in the orphanage in the musical Annie, an adorable annoyance to the rest of the cast in a series of inspired sight gags. These are full-blown characters, despite almost no dialogue. Only one scene—a Tin Pan Alley hits montage which feels the need to explain that Waller didn’t write all these songs, (though he may well have had a few hits stolen from him)–requires a conventional spoken-word set-up. The players have clear-cut differences in temperament, vocal ranges and exhibitionist impulses.

I wish they were more physically different, too, for comedy’s sake, but maybe that’s what I’m still figuring out about how things get scaled down and spatially altered at the Long Wharf.

“Your Feet’s Too Big,” Eskew and Barry-Hill bray. Is Fats too big for Long Wharf? Not when “Squeeze Me”’s here too. Plus, any show about putting a happy, cartoon expression on the face of a Great Depression needs to be reexplored right now.

Occupy Waller Street!

David Schramm as Toby Belch and Jordan Coughty as Andrew Aguecheek in Mark Lamos' Westport Country Playhouse production of Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, which closes Nov. 5. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

David Schramm works when he wants to. He’s just been offered a new play, but doesn’t like the idea of spending six weeks in the Midwest in the middle of winter.

Playing Toby Belch in Twelfth Night in Connecticut in autumn—during storms which rage as wildly as the one which wrecks ships at the beginning of Shakespeare’s otherwise funny and romantic play—was another story.

The Westport Country Playhouse production of Twelfth ends this weekend. The final performances are Friday, Nov. 4 at 8 p.m. and Saturday, Nov. 5 at 3 & 8 p.m.

“When this came up, I thought it fits like a glove,” Schramm says. “The way I remembered it, I thought it was a much smaller part—roll on, belch a little. But it’s this excessive, energetic role where he’s always thinking.”

This is not one of those situations where you can say an actor is a “revelation” in a role. Schramm is exactly as great in the part as you expect him to be. Some actors are just born to play Shakespeare’s clowns, and David Schramm is one of them.

Strangely, though, he hasn’t hardly done it before. This is his first Toby Belch, and he’s only just been asked to do Falstaff somewhere. “You HAVE to,” I berate him. “I know,” he says.

Schramm’s best known as the repellent Aeromass Airline mini-magnate Roy Biggins. The TV role paid him well enough throughout the ‘90s that he can afford to be choosy when returning to the stage.  “I’d been in every regional theater in America. That’s what got me Wings; they saw me in something in L.A.” Some actors complain about the grind of series TV, but for Schramm, “I didn’t known you could work and have weekends and evenings free.” It didn’t hurt that “Wings had the perfect cast, and except for just one, Crystal Bernard, we were all theater people.”

One dream role, besides Falstaff, which could lure Schramm back to the boards these days is Sheridan Whiteside in The Man Who Came to Dinner. He also has a soft spot for  the 1954 Marcel Pagnol musical Fanny.

Schramm deems the Westport Country Playhouse to be “an enormously intimate space, with very good sound.” He marvels at the old posters on the walls and wonders which roles some of the aging stars played in certain productions. He’s old enough to remember the era when Hollywood stars would tour nationally around theaters like Westport’s. He tells of seeing Tallulah Bankhead in Here Today in the early ‘60s, and audiences laughing at everything Bankhead said, however incomprehensible, “because she was Tallulah Bankhead.”

Today’s stage actors have to work somewhat harder for the laughs. They certainly earn them in Twelfth Night, a boisterous and colorful production appropriately tinged with grief and confusion as the assorted inhabitants of the isle of Illyria deal with natural disasters, mistaken identities, unrequited love and some cruel and unusual pranks.

Schramm worked “four or five times” previously with director Mark Lamos, when Lamos was running Hartford Stage. Lamos is famous for his Shakespeares, but not at Westport, where this confidently comic and emotionally complex production is not only his first Shakespeare for the theater but just the third in the institution’s history.

“He really does know the plays,” Schramm says of Lamos, by way of explaining how fluid, clear and well-spoken the production is. “He would often, without the book in his hand, be able to correct you in a line reading.

Justin Kruger (Fabian), David Schramm (Toby Belch), Jordan Coughtry (Andrew Aguecheek) and Donnetta Lavinia Grays (Maria) in the vaguely Edwardian-styled Twelfth Night at the Westport Country Playhouse through November 5. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

As for the reblocking required when Darius De Haas, who plays Feste in Twelfth Night, tore his Achille’s tendon during the curtain call at a preview performance, Schramm shrugs, “You do what you have to do. When Darius got hurt, I thought he’d have to leave the production. That would have been harder.”

Which is a lot more considerate than Toby Belch is to many of his onstage boozing buddies. It’s a grand, take-no-prisoners (except Malvolio) role, and Schramm’s the guy grand enough to play it.

David Margulies and Kristine Nielsen as they appeared in The Rivals at Baltimore’s CenterStage last month. Photo by Richard Anderson.

…and David Margulies and Kristine Nielsen as they appeared in the world premiere of Lil’s 90th by Darci Picoult at the Long Wharf Theatre two seasons ago. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

At the Long Wharf tribute to Gordon Edelstein’s first decade of leadership last month, I ran into one of my favorite actors, David Margulies.
(I also ran into one of my favorite playwrights, Donald Margulies, who is no relation to David and says “we get mistaken for each other all the time. He gets my bad reviews.”)
Long Wharf subscribers know Margulies as the furniture dealer in The Price (directed by Gordon Edelstein), the anxious father in Daniel Fish’s fishbowl rendition of Clifford Odets’ Rocket to the Moon, and—going back 15 years now—the dithery Richard Hardcastle in Doug Hughes’ production of Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer. Most recently, he was the easily scammed senior citizen in the Long Wharf’s world premiere of Darci Picoult’s drama Lil’s 90th, directed by Jo Bonney.

Sopranos fans know David Margulies as Tony’s lawyer Neil Mink. In Ghostbusters, he was the Mayor of New York City. Some of us were privileged to see him as Roy Cohn in the final cast of the original Broadway production of Angels in America.

I told Margulies, who I knew would understand my glee, that David Schramm was playing Toby Belch in Twelfth Night at Westport Country Playhouse, and wasn’t that cool?” Margulies countered with the equally dazzling casting news that he himself was playing Anthony Absolute in Sheridan’s The Rivals at Baltimore CenterStage. He played the same role in 1996 for Mark Lamos at Hartford Stage, and I can still remember the amusing way he kicked up his heels in those tight Restoration era stockings.

That CenterStage production just closed, but Margulies can now be seen online in one of the splattery short films Danny DeVito produces at The Blood Factory, thebloodfactory.com. Margulies enlivens the wish-fulfillment horror flicklet Skin Deep as a horny representative of the The Devil May Care collection agency, getting some face time with old client Erica Taylor.

You want to see range? Watch Margulies morph from Carmen Miranda to a ragtime piano player to a whiskered beast. Skin Deep is here.

The horror site Dread Central did a piece on the making of Skin Deep here.

Steven Epp, Don Darryl Rivera, Allen Gilmore and Daniel Breaker in the Intiman Theatre production of Moliere’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself in September 2010. Epp (in the role of Sgaranelle played in Seattle by Breaker) and Gilmore are in the forthcoming Yale Repertory Theatre production of the show, Nov. 26-Dec. 17. Photo by Chris Bennion.

They’ve announced the cast for the next Yale Rep show, Moliere’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself, playing Nov. 26 through Dec. 17. The production brings back the director/star team of Christopher Bayes and Steven Epp, who oversaw the Rep’s hit rendition of Goldoni’s The Servant of Two Masters in February 2010. That previous show used a translation by Constance Congdon, and had connections to a Hartford Stage production in which Epp and Bayes both appeared in 1996.

Moliere and Goldoni lived a couple generations apart but are linked by the funnybone, both pushing the boundaries of, and transcending the traditional stage-comedy form known as commedia. All you need to know about A Doctor in Spite of Himself is that it makes fun of doctors the way that The Servant of Two Masters made of masters. Good timeless anti-authoritarian fun.

Several other veterans of the Rep’s Servant have returned to do A Doctor in Spite of Himself, which stars Epp in the title role of Sganarelle. Liam Craig, who was Brighella and Porter in Servant, will be Lucas and Thibault in Doctor. Allen Gilmore, who was Pantalone in the Goldoni play (and who played Argante in Christopher Bayes’ productionsof Moliere’s Scapin in both Chicago and Seattle in 2002) gets to play another comical dad character, Geronte, as well as Sganarelle’s neighbor Monsieur Robert.

There’s another reunion going on.

Epp—star of Servant of Two Masters and accomplished clown/actor who made his name with Minnesota’s Theatre de Jeune Lune (a troupe which visited Yale Rep twice in the 1990s)—will play the conniving woodcutter Sganarelle.

If you thought “naturally he will,” it might not have been a forgone conclusion. When Bayes and Epp’s adaptation of The Doctor in Spite of Himself played the Intiman Theatre in Seattle last year, it starred Daniel Breaker (whose Broadway roles include the Youth in Passing Strange and the Donkey in Shrek) as Sganarelle. Epp was in that cast as well, but he played the servant Lucas, which is now Liam Craig’s part. Besides Epp, Craig, and Gilmore, the Yale Rep Doctor of Spite of Himself also feature Renata Friedman returning to her Intiman role of Geronte’s daughter Lucinde.

Cast members unique to the Yale production are:
Lucas’ wife Jacqueline is played by Julie Briskman, who played Corinne to Christopher Bayes’ Harlequin in a 1993 production of The Triumph of Love at the Guthrie Theater (where she was a company member for seven years), has been working steadily in the Seattle regional theater realm for the past decade. Jacob Ming Trent, who did the succession of non-family roles in Eric Ting’s Long Wharf Theatre production of A.R. Gurney’s Sylvia, will be Valere. Justine Williams, who worked with director Bayes on the Glass Contraption show Clowns at the Public Theatre, is Martine and Perrin. Chivas Michael, who is in the recent BAM production of Brooklyn Omnibus (by Stew of Passing Strange/Negro Problem fame), plays Leandre.

Unlike the Epp/Bayes Servant of Two Masters, A Doctor in Spite of Himself will eschew the traditional proscenium of the Yale University Theatre for the more newfangled stage of the Yale Repertory Theatre. The design teams includes Matt Saunders, a third-year Scenic Design student who did the extraordinary multi-platformed environment for the School of Drama show Jib last year; costume designer Kristin Fiebig (who worked on the Yale Summer Cabaret’s As You Like It), Yi Zhao, whose knack for shadows was seen in Jib and the recent Yale Cabaret show hundredyearspacetrip; and sound designer Ken Goodwin. There’s also live music composed by Aaron Halva, also of the Intiman production of Doctor in Spite of Himself, and performed by Halva and Seattle-based musicians Greg Powers and Robertson Witmer.

Following the Yale Rep run, the Yale Rep’s A Doctor in Spite of Himself moves to Berkeley Repertory Theatre (where Epp has previously appeared in Moliere’s The Miser) for a Feb. 10-March 25 run.

Darius De Haas (right) as he appeared in previews of Twelfth Night at Westport Country Playhouse. Mark Lamos' production of the Shakespeare comedy plays on through Nov. 5. Photo by T. Charles Erickson.

For Darius De Haas the Westpoort Country Playhouse production of Twelfth Night is “my first public Shakespeare. I studied Shakespeare in school, but this is my first professional production.” The theater’s not far ahead of him. While director Mark Lamos is renowned for his Shakespeares—in New York, at numerous regional theaters and especially at his old Hartford Stage stomping grounds—this is only the third time in its 80 year history that the Westport Country Playhouse has done a Shakespeare play.

“From the first day, there was this great leveling in terms of everybody being part of one experience. We had to discuss the play, then break down the dialogue and meter, learning it as quickly as we could,” De Haas says.

When learning the role of Feste—a clown of unusual depth and gravity even for Shakespeare, right up there with the bard’s Fool in King’s Lear—De Haas says “I didn’t want to put a big conception of the character on it. I wanted to read it, get what the character was saying and doing. What’s he’s doing is heightened in terms of the other characters. I wanted to keep it basic, let the concept come as I became more comfortable.

Then it suddenly became uncomfortable, but not because of anything Shakespeare had written.

“At the curtain call, I hit my foot against a ramp onstage, that was buried in the sand.” De Haas injured his Achilles tendon. After a fraught few hours of wondering how to proceed, De Haas decided he would continue to perform the role, from a wheelchair. There was a frantic day of reblocking, which caused the cancellation of the final preview performance, but the show made its scheduled opening night, and the reviews have been encouraging. (Anita Gates in the New York Times

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/23/nyregion/twelfth-night-at-the-westport-country-playhouse-review.html

called the show “very pretty, very funny and very lilting.” (My own review for the Fairfield County Weekly is here; previous NHTJ items on Twelfth Night are here, here, here and here.)

“Because it happened so quickly, on my part, I had no time to think about it,” De Haas says of his injury and its effect on the production. “There were many, many people they could bring in if they had to replace me, but that doesn’t mean it would have been easy. Mark [Lamos] has played Feste himself, years ago, though I don’t think he was looking forward to having to relearn the part under those conditions. For me, I was just, well, if can do it in a wheelchair… My thinking had to change so fast!”

Though he’d been prancing about the stage prior to the injury, having to keep Feste sedentary and wheelchair bound didn’t upend De Haas’ conception of the clown:

“I wanted to keep him rooted in humanity. I didn’t realize how difficult it was. He has a penchant for saying things which sound foolish but are really very deep. He’s telling Olivia ‘Get on your life. You’re young. You’re beautiful. It’s not going to last forever.’ I have relationships like that in real life.”

As for the popular question of whether the servant Malvolio deserves all the abuse and torture heaped on him, and whether Shakespeare might have provided a tad more motivation for Twelfth Night’s pranksters to humiliate the character, De Haas offers advice an acting teacher once gave him: “Don’t question it.”

Circumstances in the play—mistaken identities, sudden fallings in love , swordfights and shipwrecks—overwhelm the characters at every turn. Considering the chaos, Feste’s one of the cooler heads onstage.

“Sometimes he’s played as sad clown, on his last legs…” Suddenly De Haas bursts into laughter. “Hahaha! Forgive the pun!

In terms of mirthful mobility and emotional reach, helps that De Haas is an accomplished musical theater performer and concert vocalist. He doesn’t have to fly around the stage to command your attention. His voice can enchant you without any extra antic movement. He worked directly with the composer/sound designer John Gromada on Feste’s songs. “John was thankfully very familiar with my work, and fashioned the songs to me. I was free to suggest things. I’d done a recording of  some Shakespearean sonnets, so this wasn’t entirely new for me.”

Despite the setback of an onstage injury, Darius De Haas is rolling on. “This is a release for the holidays.”

1. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Writer/producer Aaron Sorkin is an unapologetic diehard who regularly drops Gilbert & Sullivan quotes into the dialogue he writes. He’s used “I’m never ever sick at sea as a punchline more than once.” For the opening episode of his unfortunately shortlived series about a live late-night comedy show, Sorkin has the show’s new producers stuck on the all-important “cold opening” number until someone says the inspirational word “model.” “You know who did the best frat humor of all time?” rhetorically asks Matt Albie (Matthew Perry). “It was W.S. Gilbert,” answers Danny Tripp (Bradley Whtiford). The team then proceed to fashion an opening number which rewrites “Modern Major General” from Pirates of Penzance to reflect the front-page news that the Tripp had “got caught doing blow.” What’s extraordinary is not just that we hear the routine being conceived and written, but we actually see it performed with full orchestra and chorus, everyone dressed in white. That’s actually where it fails for me—the “Musical of Andrew Lloyd Webber”-style concert staging, rather than a design more fitting to G&S. Still exhilarating, though, especially the build-up.

There’s a real-life precedent for G&S on SNL: the entire company of the Public Theatre production of Pirates of Penzance for a Christmas episode in 1980.
2. Sunday Night: Debbie Harry, Taj Mahal and Michele Gray doing “Never mind the why and wherefore” from HMS Pinafore, with sax and turntables, on the wondrous late-‘80s eclectic pop music variety series Sunday Night, produced by Lorne Michaels and hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn.

Rundgren did the Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare (“Love, unrequited, robs me from my rest”) from Iolanthe on his 1974 solo album Todd.
3. The Pirate Movie (1982). One of the factors that capsized the entire pirate adventure film for over a decade, until Johnny Depp set sail. This ridiculous, disrespectful rewrite of Pirates of Penzance (in the wake of Joe Papp’s Public Theater revival) features new songs such as “Pumpin’ and Blowin’ amid disco-ized treatments of G&S, vocalized by Kristy McNichol and Christopher (Blue Lagoon) Atkins.
4. With 1945’s Hollywood Pinafore, ace Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman showed his devotion to G&S by rewriting the lyrics and plots, which both demonstrates Kaufman’s extraordinary self-confidence and bravado and belies his professed hatred of Broadway musicals. Critics claimed his book, a satire of the golden age of Hollywood while it was still happening, was the weak link in this production, which ran 52 performances in 1945. Sample character names: Ralph Rackstraw, Little Miss Peggy. Sample song titles: “A Writer Fills the Lowest Niche,” “I Am the Monarch of the Joint,” “The Merry Maiden and the Jerk.”
5. Here’s a How-De-Do punk version by Bill Remmers.
6. Groucho Marx’s The Mikado. The Mikado is the G&S that has had the best-known conceptual overhauls over the years: There’s been a Cool Mikado (1962), a Black Mikado (1975), Peter Sellar’s modern Walkman-studded Mikado, and Jonathan Miller’s hit British version which showed the show to be a satire of England rather than Japan. (Eric Idle was Koko in the original British production of Miller’s version and its subsequent video, though Miller’s old Beyond the Fringe castmate Dudley Moore played the role in New York). Groucho’s, performed live for the Bell Telephone Hour in 1959, may be the best documented of any of them, coming up in virtually all the biographies of him and a few of his autobiographical projects. There was also a soundtrack album, reissued on CD in 2007. Groucho’s singing voice has deteriorated since his Captain Spaulding days, but he puts the songs across with great comic strength on the record, even without listeners being able to see his eyebrows. The rest of the cast isn’t shabby: Stanley Holloway, Helen Traubel, Dennis King, Barbara Meister and Robert Rounsville.
7. Pinafore! A gay-themed, nearly all-male 2001 adaptation by Mark Savage. Here in New Haven, one of the first productions by the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus was a Pirates of Penzance where everyone but Mabel was played by a man.
8. Animaniacs, HMS Yakko. Takes from both Pirates and Pinafore.

9. Tom Lehrer, “The Elements.” The periodic table sung to the tune of the Major-General’s song from Pirates of Penzance.
10. This one’s mine, and it’s Mikado again. At a coffeehouse concert in Bethany a few years ago I debuted my ukulele mash-up of “A Wandering Minstrel I” by Gilbert & Sullivan and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” by Paul McCartney & Wings. It has mercifully not been performed since.