Gilbert and Sullivan

That was a terrible sentence and I apologize to everyone on this board.

Topsy-Turvy is one of my favorite movies ever, though.

All the way. Absolutely wonderful for many different reasons.

Incidentally: Why, if Mike Leigh is capable of such a lovely mise en scene, are his other films so indifferent in that regard? It's baffling. The film is faboo. Especially that opening crane shot of the theater seats being turned down.

"Pirates of Penzance" is no doubt my favorite, though I have much of "The Mikado" memorized thanks to a high school production for which I served as set artist and backstage manager.

I still can't get my mind around Mike Leigh. I like almost all of his movies, but who would ever guess that the man who made Topsy Turvy is the same man who made Naked.

Interesting thing about Gilbert, he died while saving a drowning woman in a river. There are much worse ways to go.

i have to say i think much of their satire, while wickedly funny in spots, doesn't necessarily have teeth. neither of the pair seemed inclined to throw much in the way of social criticism in their audience's face. which is fine by me.

do you guys listen to any other operetta? i'm just starting to learn about this stuff. i like lehar's "merry widow" a lot.

would that the simpsons' musical numbers were as good as g&s. i mostly applaud them for the effort, not so much the results.

oh, i wish captain sensible hadn't done that G&S song, b.t.w.

Exactamundo. I have also liked the snippets of "The Mikado" that I've seen.

Pirates + singing + the Major General song = best thing that ever happened in history.

No, no, Gilbert and Sullivan is precisely what I love about the English. I mean, my 2003 album virtually is 'The Pirates of Penzance'.

G&S are 'high density songwriting' at its finest. They can pack the characters, words and jokes into a song like Kowloon packs its yellow coolies into a mansion block, what! Have another puff of opium, old boy!

i've been waiting all my life for some decent hip hop sampling or new waver cover of that "keep pumping / keep blowing" song. from an amazon review: "watching this one afternoon with my young nieces, who adore it, I was struck at how much Kristy McNichol sounds like a less husky and more on-key Britney Spears"

-i'm ashamed to say it but after seeing for the first time last year [dunno how i missed it during monty python soaked youth] that flying circus ep. where graham does the most unbelievable engrish, in full "last emperor" getup [sorry, dunno the name of that special round cap with long braid off the back], as some sort of consular official in russia i think but inexplicably acting like a castmember of the mikado, i just will never be able to think of G&S the same way again. his pronunciation of cornwall topped even that granny's 3-octave delivery of the word "handbag" in that masterpiece theatre version of importance of being ernest. which work i always associate with G&S - which leads me to wonder to what extent G&S operetta is "gay" if you know what i mean: like wilde & coward, and unlike say shaw, the torrent of words seems intended to divert thought away from meaning and towards dancing whorls of absurd presentations - a sort of defense mechanism..? the big choruses in G&s avoid seeming like a typical "macho" effect in theatrical music: massed army deployment but instead sort of collapse like a faulty biplane prototype under their own buffoonish subject matter.

not that it really trips my gaydar or anything. but when i think about it it starts to evince of itself. engrish is rather suggestive of a lisp, after all.

Really they deserve a medal for getting the-very-most-number-of-syllables-humanly-possible into a line of verse. If you've ever had to sing any of the tunes, you know what I mean. Enunciation is U&K.

Five years on and yes to most of this thread, really. (Having recently rewatched Topsy-Turvy.)

Classic. Favorites are "When I Was A Lad" and "As It May Happen" aka "I've Got A Little List."

I guess I also like "Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General." The math team at my high school gave out a cheat sheet with commonly used formulas under the title "Many Cheerful Facts."