Lackluster Sorcery

IDEALLY, GILBERT AND SULLIVAN plays should be gala affairs, lively and entertaining. Fair maidens and young gents dance on stage, singing quick-paced songs and sporting loud costumes. But The Sorceror, one of the duo's less known musicals, just doesn't live up to this expectation as presented by the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players at Agassiz Theatre.

Admittedly, it takes a lot of elbow grease to put a shine on a play that seems well-worn even before the curtain goes up. The Players took a gamble in dragging The Sorceror off some dusty, dark shelf out into the limelight. Yet at least they could have done it with polish.

Lack-luster though it was, The Sorceror is not without some good performances. Lisa Zeidenberg, playing the beautiful Aline, dazzled the audience with an elegant and refined voice. She sang with precise diction--an important factor in making fast-paced Gilbert and Sullivan verse comprehensible. Aline is engaged to marry the wealthy Alex Poindextre (played by Paul Moreaux), a naive Richie Rich who dreams of saving the world through a magical universal love. Alex's exploits create a mid-summer night's dream love tangle, where everyone falls in love with their personality opposite. Though Moreaux played the part to the hilt, his delivery, in contrast to Zeidenberg's, put more strain on the audience's ability to follow the verse.

Singing aside, Tucker McCrady's playing of the sorcerer who sold the love potion to Alex had the sold-out audience roaring with laughter. However, his one-liners and humorous antics could not save The Sorceror from an overall lack of energy. The blame for this major flaw falls on the shoulders of director Thomas P. Large. His attempt to spice up the play with jokes not originally in the script failed to enliven his production.

A lackadaisical performance by the orchestra further weighed down this play that could not get off the ground. Many of the musicians played neither smoothly nor even completely seriously. They were loud without being vigorous--and, as in the case of the actors on stage, the failure was not with individual performances, but with the musical direction.

Even the staging worked against a lively performance. The stage props, a tree and a stairwell, crowded out the nearly 20 performers on the already cramped stage. Dance and summersaults on stage became frustrated acrobatics as actors struggled to jump onto the tree in order to make room for the entrances of other actors.

On the whole, The Sorceror suffers less from such strains as from lack of energy and an oddly somber tone. One's expectations for the liveliness of a Gilbert and Sullivan highlight this failing. If you've never seen a Gilbert and Sullivan play before, you might enjoy this performance. But if you've seen one before, you may not want to see them all.