New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players
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New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players is a professional repertory theatre company, based in New York City that has specialized in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan (G&S) for over 30 years. It performs an annual season at City Center and also tours. In 2008, the company scheduled performances at City Center in both January and June.
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[edit] History
[edit] Early years
Albert Bergeret, formerly a longstanding member of the Barnard Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a New York City college theatre group that presented G&S from 1948 to 1991, founded the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players (NYGASP) in 1974 together with his wife, Gail Wofford (they married in 1978), and a few others, mostly alumni of the Barnard group. Bergeret still serves as its Artistic Director and General Manager, and Wofford continues to create the costumes and helps to run the company, along with one or two of the original Barnard alumni and a few more recent additions to the NYGASP team, including Assistant General Manager/actor David Wannen and Assistant Music Director Andrea Stryker-Rodda.
The nascent group's first performance was in Strauss Park, on the Upper West Side of Manhattan, on July 14, 1974. In the early years of the company, singers were drawn from Columbia University and from the semi-pro New York theatre community and sang without compensation. Originally called "West Side Gilbert & Sullivan Players", the group originally performed scenes from Gilbert and Sullivan operas with a sound system and a cast of nine people in outdoor performances and in nursing homes around New York City, with borrowed costumes, set pieces and an electric piano from the New York Grand Opera, the Bloomingdale School of Music and others. Their first indoor home was at the B’nai Jeshurun Community Center. Bergeret designed and built the sets and acted as stage and musical director. In 1975, the company incorporated as a not-for-profit organization under the current name.
At the beginning of 1976, the company incorporated under its present name and began to offer runs in repertory on Sundays, the only day the theater was available, since the New York School of Opera used the space on other days. After several Sunday performances of H.M.S Pinafore and Trial by Jury, they broadened their audience by premiering a new production of The Pirates of Penzance on Sunday afternoon, February 29, 1976 – the character Frederic's 30th birthday. Bergeret appeared on stage ahead of the performance, made up as the 120-year-old hero, and a substantial cake (and the presence of WQXR Radio's manager, Robert Sherman) was cut and shared with the audience. That autumn, the company had grown sufficiently to permit four shows – Pinafore, Pirates, The Mikado, and Iolanthe – to be presented in rotation. By 1978, the company was performing full weeks runs of the operas at the 700-seat Symphony Space theatre in New York, including a production celebrating the centenary of H.M.S. Pinafore. Bergeret traded his services as the first Technical Director of Symphony Space (and Wofford was House Manager) in exchange for office space, storage and theatre dates.
Bergeret was ambitious, and he wanted his company to grow and become fully professional. In May 1979, NYGASP hired its first 25-piece orchestra and began to pay performance fees to principal singers as the level of professionalism of its cast continued to increase. NYGASP scored a publicity coup on October 28, 1979, when pictures of the cast performing excerpts from Pinafore on the Staten Island Ferry were displayed on the Sunday New York Times and in the New York Daily News. The Company’s audience developed further at Symphony Space as the company celebrated the centennials of the G&S operas there, beginning with The Pirates of Penzance in 1979. NYGASP attracted such loyal fans and supporters as writer Isaac Asimov and began to gain favorable and frequent reviews in the Times and the Daily News, among others.[1]
[edit] The 1980s and 1990s
The 1981 season opened with NYGASP's celebration of the Patience centenary in April 1981 (hosted by Asimov). In the fall of 1981, NYGASP began touring its productions along the U.S. East Coast in addition to its short New York seasons. By the early 1980s, NYGASP paid performance fees not only to principal singers, but also to choristers. The company was able to attract an increased level of contributions, including annual grants from the New York State Council on the Arts. By the mid-1980s, NYGASP had attracted an independent Board of Directors to assist with fund raising and risk management.[2]
NYGASP has imported various guest stars over the years to appeal to a larger audience. Some of those, like Steve Allen, were criticized for their lack of experience in the genre. In 1984, however, NYGASP hired John Reed, the former principal comedian of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, to join NYGASP for a centennial production of Princess Ida at Symphony Space. He remained as the company's principal comedian for five more of its New York seasons. Reed's performances were a particular treat for Gilbert and Sullivan fans, to whom he was well known. His presence also attracted additional professional singers to NYGASP for the chance to perform with him, and he was able to impart some of his experience to company regulars. At a gala benefit for the company at Symphony Space in 1987, Reed, dressed as the Lord Chancellor from Iolanthe, proposed marriage, on stage, to celebrity guest Dr. Ruth Westheimer.
NYGASP averaged four productions a year at Symphony Space during the 1980s and 1990s, each playing for about a week. In 1985, the orchestra was unionized, and in 1989 the company entered into an agreement with the Actors' Equity union. The company's repertoire expanded throughout the 1980s, and it gradually produced all of the extant G&S Savoy operas. There was also a short-lived attempt in 1989 to broaden the company's repertory beyond G&S, when it presented Gershwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical Of Thee I Sing. But the experiment proved too expensive for the company, and since then, NYGASP has stayed with G&S (and a few presentations of Sullivan collaborations with other librettists). NYGASP recovered from a financially difficult 1990 with the help of supporter contributions and a willingness of its audiences to pay higher ticket prices, and the company survived (after one dark season), and continued to grow, through the 1990s, outliving the other professional light opera companies in New York City, notably the year-round Light Opera of Manhattan. In 1997 the company hired a professional touring management company.
[edit] Recent years
In 2001, NYGASP had to find a new venue because Symphony Space closed for renovations. NYGASP decided to rent City Center, a 2,750 seat theatre in midtown Manhattan, for its January 2002 season. During a three-week run of Pirates, H.M.S. Pinafore, and The Mikado, the company enjoyed excellent box office returns and continues to perform at City Center each year. Moving to this large house further increased NYGASP's level of recognition and made it an organization with an annual budget of nearly 1.5 million dollars.
For their recent New York seasons, NYGASP has generally two or three G&S operas, at least one of which is one of the "Big Three" (Pinafore, Pirates or Mikado) and one of which is one of the less often seen G&S operas. NYGASP continues to present broadly traditional productions of Gilbert and Sullivan, usually with a number of topical references thrown in. In their Pirates production, for instance, at one point the company performs a kick-line parody of A Chorus Line. But mostly they stay close to Gilbert's libretti.[3] NYGASP uses a number of different directors and conductors from time to time, but most of the productions are still directed and/or conducted by Bergeret. Notable singers who have recently performed with the company include soprano Kimilee Bryant (2008), Hal Linden (2005), and tenors Keith Jameson (ENO; NYCO) and Brandon Jovanovich (San Francisco Opera; NYCO), who have gone on to substantial opera careers.
NYGASP continues to tour up and down the East Coast and in other parts of the U.S. several times each year, performing regularly at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia; the National Park for the Performing Arts outside Washington, DC; Van Wezel Hall in Sarasota, Florida; the Mann Center outside Philadelphia; McCarter Theater in Princeton, New Jersey; and the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut; among other venues. In 2004, the company was engaged to present two G&S productions in Buxton, England, at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival. NYGASP also presents a few special events each year, usually at Symphony Space, often featuring pastiches or lesser-known Sullivan music. The company is also known for annual events where company members present favorite songs in concert, and there is often a segment where spontaneous audience requests are played, with orchestra, and with singers chosen on the spot by the conductor. It also offers small groups of singers for concerts, private and corporate events and outdoor performances, under the name "Wand’ring Minstrels." In addition, NYGASP groups have often performed on the "listening room" program on WQXR radio in New York City and have been seen on the local broadcast of The Today Show on Saturday morning on NBC.
In January 2007, NYGASP presented, as part of its City Center season, one performance of The Rose of Persia, a comic opera by Sullivan and Basil Hood that had not been performed by a professional company in America for over a century. In also produced a Gilbert and Sullivan potpourri CD, Oh Joy! Oh, Rapture!
[edit] School and outreach programs
Each season, NYGASP offers a few full-scale performances of its main stage productions to NYC public school groups free of charge (paid for by corporate sponsors). It also presents its "Family Overtures" series of pre-show introductions for multi-generational audiences. In addition, Bergeret and small groups of performers from NYGASP travel to private schools in New York City to give concert-classes about the music and satire of Gilbert and Sullivan and other aspects of presenting G&S. The company also presents nearly full-scale or shortened versions of the shows at various schools throughout the school year.
NYGASP has an arrangement with the school district in Syosset, New York, in which, each spring, a shortened version of one of a G&S opera is presented at a school, with piano accompaniment, using NYGASP principals, and giving an opportunity to 40-60 6th grade students to act as the chorus. The music teachers teach the students their vocal parts, and then Bergeret and a NYGASP accompanist teach the students the staging and choreography of the show and refine the choral music. The children rehearse for a full day with the NYGASP principals and have the opportunity to ask any questions that may occur to them. Two performances are given by the students at their school. In addition, introductory programs are given in advance to each of the 5th and 6th grade classes in the school district, to acquaint the students with some of the material and any special concepts they may need to understand (such as "apprenticeship" in The Pirates of Penzance or the British class structure in H.M.S. Pinafore). Sometimes the children also travel to New York City to see a full-scale NYGASP production.
[edit] See also
[edit] Notes
[edit] References
- Smith, Dinitia. "Decades of Polishing Up the Handle", New York Times, December 31, 2005, p. 9, Section B, Col. 3.
- Profile of the company by Theatremania.com
- New York Times Review and Profile of the company (2004)
- Review of Pinafore discussing NYGASP's new home at City Center (2002)
[edit] External links
- NYGASP website
- Broadwayworld.com review of NYGASP's Pirates from January 18, 2005
- Article about the local 802 musician's union negotiations with NYGASP
- NY Times review of NYGASP's Mikado, January 8, 2007
- NY Post review of NYGASP's Yeomen, January 8, 2007
- NY Magazine feature, January 23, 2006 issue
- Review of NYGASP's Iolanthe at City Center (2004)
- NY Times review mentioning John Reed (1988)
- NY Times review mentioning Steve Allen (1995)
- Profile of the company and review of Princess Ida starring Frank Gorshin (2000)
- Review of the company's Mikado (2006)
- Description of the company's annual New Year's Eve Gala
- Collection of profiles of Al Bergeret and NYGASP
