THE TORONTO STAR
Friday,
May 4, 2001 Section C
Leo, The Royal Cadet ably cast
By William
Littler
Canada's
first mega-hit? Forget about your Paul Ankas, your Anne Murrays and your Shania
Twains and prepare to salute Leo, The Royal Cadet.
And if you turn up at the St.
Lawrence Centre's Jane Mallett Theatre between now and Sunday, you can expect
Leo, in his bright red jacket and pillbox cap, to salute right back at you.
Yes after decades of snoozing on a
library shelf, Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann's vintage 1889 "military
opera" has returned to active theatrical duty at the enterprising hands of
Toronto Operetta Theatre, looking and sounding every bit like the proudly
British colonial artifact it once was.
Review
A man about Kingston music, who
led orchestras, founded a music school and even built violins on the side,
Telgmann was a largely self-taught composer with the wit to root his exercise
in colonial Gilbert and Sullivan in his own back yard.
Raising the curtain on picnic
grounds outside the Royal Military College, he and his local librettists,
George and Charles Cameron, used the cadets as their subject matter, with the
amorous, patriotic Leo as a hero who would set the mold into which a whole
platoon of subsequent Canadian bravehearts, from Nelson Eddy's cinematic
mounties to Paul Gross's telegenic Constable Brenton Fraser, would eventually
squeeze.
Propositioned by Captain
Bloodswigger to accept the challenge of the military life, Leo parts from his
beloved Nellie and her delicious pumpkin pie to fight the Zulus in distant
Natal (talk about irony: next door, in the Bluma Appel Theatre, Athol Fugard's
The Island was simultaneously portraying a very different South Africa from a
native point of view).
It is much to the credit of
director Guillermo Silva-Marin that he allowed the leopard-skinned, spear
brandishing Zulus a measure of dignity, instead of making them the music hall
characters they might well have been on the stage of Martin's Opera House back
in 1889.
Or were they? "Now for
justice," the aria of the Zulu King Ketchko (an actual historical figure),
sounded entirely serious when Richard Shaw sang it. Perhaps Telgmann and his
librettists may have been less racist than their mentors, Gilbert and Sullivan.
Not that this version of Leo, The
Royal Cadet presents all the evidence. In order to make the piece stageworthy
for modern audiences, Virginia Reh has adopted libretto, conflating its four
acts into two and eliminating eight of the 17 characters.
In its slimmed down form, the plot
moves along swiftly, tells a simple story legibly and survives without needing
to be camped up. Even the battle scene has been cleverly choreographed and
danced in a stylized manner as a two-step rather than fought in a cartoon
manner by the opposing sides.
Breast-swelling national pride
should nevertheless not blind us to the limitations of the score. Sullivan at
his worst was a better tunesmith than Telgmann at his best, who musical philosophy
seems to have been founded on the notion that anything worth saying once is
worth repeating again and again.
With a limited range of keys, a
persistence of four bar structures and a habit of emulation rather than
original thought, his music is as easy to forget as it is to assimilate.
But it probably sounds more
sophisticated now than it did when its composer wrote it, thanks to John
Greer's replacement of the missing orchestrations with those of his own
(inventively written for a Benjamin Britten chamber opera sized ensemble of
13).
Greer, who also conducts has given
the operetta a stronger finale by adding the Faerie Opera one of the
characters, the lisping poet Wind, talks incessantly about writing throughout
the plot.
Basing the music for it on a Victorian
salon song by Roscoe and Codman, he even includes witty allusions to the
Windsor Forest scene of Verdi's Falstaff along the way.
With an able cast, strongly headed
by Eric Shaw's Leo and Alexandra Lennox's Nellie, and including Kevin Power as
Wind, Luc LaLonde as Captain Bloodswigger, Gisèle Fredette as Caroline and
Bruce Kelly as Colonel Hewett, this is probably as splendid a re-creation of
Leo, The Royal cadet as we could have hoped for. But it does demonstrate how
good Gilbert and Sullivan really were.
Photo is of Gisele Fredette as Caroline,
Alexandra Lennox as Nellie, Michelle
Bogdanowicz as Madge and TOT Chorus,
in LEO, THE ROYAL CADET
THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Saturday, May 5, 2001
Everyone loves a Victorian in uniform
Reviewed by Urjo Kareda
There can't be any other operettas
set in both Kingston, Ont., and Isandlwana, Africa, as Oscar Ferdinand
Telgmann's Leo, The Royal Cadet is, but its locations are the least of its
historical interest. The work was premiered in Kingston in 1889, "under
the Patronage of the Commandant and Staff, and Gentleman Cadets of the Royal
Military College, " and went on to tour, in Canada and the United States.
By 1925, it had totalled over 1,700 performances.
Leo,
The Royal cadet, in the Toronto Operetta Theatre's winning production (launched
at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Thursday), returns to Kingston next week, with
the Royal Military College once again a sponsor. And, it's unlikely these days
to duplicate its earlier popularity, it certainly deserves a heartfelt salute.
The operetta is a diorama of
late-Victorian attitudes about valour, duty, the military and the fight on
behalf of the Queen against the "Zulu devils." The central story
couldn't be simpler: we see Leo become a cadet, go to Africa to fight the Zulus,
and return home victorious to claim the girl who never wanted him to be a
soldier. The charm of the piece lies with Telgmann's eclectic instincts for
tunes; his music ranges from tactful sentiment to lively comic material, all
with short spans and delightful invention.
Leo is jammed with novelty items
and odd characters. there is the fey writer Wind ("I am Wind, Wind the
poet. And the whole world doth know it"). busily at work on his Faerie
Opera (or as actor Kevin Power's choice of speech affectation transformed it, a
"Faewie Opewa"). There is also the pair of professors at the Royal
Military College, a German and a Frenchman, who perform a duet based entirely
on racial clichés.
The first act, a long picnic in
Kingston, with guests who have come all the way from Gananoque, features a
ribbon dance, a lovely unaccompanied chorale, several rousing
military-enlistment songs, and a love-song dedicated to a pumpkin pie. The
second act includes a stirring anthem for Ketcho, the Zulu chief, as well as a
pantomime battle, before we return home to Kingston and a final reprise of
Glory and Victory!
The Toronto Operetta Theatre does
the work a favour by not trying to make too much of it. They retain its innate
sweetness while goosing up its fun. The production hero is john Greer, who not
only conducted so lovingly, but also adopted the orchestrated Telgmann's score;
the original arrangement had been destroyed in flood in the composer's home in
1925. Greer's approach is affectionate and witty, with a gentle understanding
of how the music must have beguiled its first audience. In addition to droll
quotes from Mozart and Verdi, Greer also invented a sequence from the Faerie
Opera, missing entirely from the original. Librettist Virginia Reh has done
some comparably canny tweaking of the text.
Guillermo Silva-Marin's staging,
too, mixes fondness with a delicate mockery. The company can afford few visual
resources, but the rented costumes were pretty, and such challenges as the Zulu
battle were imaginatively solved. The chorus did unusually focused work: the
ensemble of cadets achieved a truly stouthearted sound, and the bevy of maidens
had true allure.
Eric Shaw provided a wonderful
Leo, his clarion tenor making the most of both the big sentimental tune (The
days of long ago) and the call to battle (To the field!); his decent,
straightforward presence anchored the show. Other notable work came from Luc
LaLonde as the amusingly puffed-up Captain Bloodswigger, Alexandra Lennox as
the faithful Nellie, Gisèle Fredette as her more savvy friend, and Ian Charles
McAndrew, who recalled W. C. Fields as a swaggering town-gent (or, as the
operetta's vocabulary puts it, a Dude). Leo, The Royal Cadet may be Toronto
Operetta Theatre's finest evening.
Photo is of Luc LaLonde as
Bloodswigger, Michelle Bogdanowicz as
Madge and Eric Shaw as Leo in LEO, THE ROYAL CADET
Visit www.torontooperetta.com