Patience, or Bunthorne's Bride

Patience Program

Patience Cast

Directors

Stage Director:  Gary Briggle

Music Director:  Dr. Randal A. Buikema

Director’s Notes

The Aesthetic Movement that swept the worlds of art, literature, fashion and manners in the England of the 1880’s was a perfect target for W.S. Gilbert’s satiric gibes. In the 1860’s Pre-Raphaelite artists and writers like James McNeill Whistler, Edward Burne-Jones, William Morris and Algernon Swinburne had tried to revolutionize the taste of their Philistine society by introducing in their work a graceful romanticism, rich and strange and verging on the erotic. But later disciples, such as young Oscar Wilde, carried the concept to ridiculous extremes. And Gilbert and Sullivan were there to ridicule.

Wilde, a talented undergraduate winner of a poetry prize at Oxford in 1878, often carried or wore a sunflower as part of his aesthetic affectation. In Patience, Gilbert nearly skewered him and his ilk with the observation that, “Though the Philistines may jostle, you will rank as an apostle in the high aesthetic band, If you walk down Piccadilly with a poppy or a lily in your mediaeval hand.”

By November 1880, Gilbert had enough of his “new piece” in hand, written just a year after The Pirates of Penzance, that he wanted to meet with Sullivan about it. He had nearly two-thirds of the libretto finished, but felt uncomfortable with the premise of two rival clergymen “worshipped by a chorus of female devotees,” borrowed from his “The Rival Curates” in The Bab Ballads. He fancied instead reverting to his idea of “rivalry between two aesthetic fanatics.”

When Patience, “An Entirely New and Original Aesthetic Opera in two acts” opened at the Opera Comique the following April, among the author’s and composer’s fans was none other than Wilde himself. Needless to say, Patience was a great hit. But when the opera opened in New York, business was slack. American audiences who had embraced H.M.S. Pinafore and Pirates didn’t know what to make of this gibe at Aestheticism – a cult that had not reached their Puritan shores.

D’Oyly Carte, in a brilliant stroke of showmanship, sent Oscar Wilde, the high priest of the aesthetic movement, on a lecture tour all across the United States. The poet came complete with velvet suit, knee britches, long hair and drooping sunflower. Carte also saw to it that Wilde attended a performance of the ailing Patience at the Standard Theatre in New York. Wilde’s lectures, as well as the opera, “caused a regular craze and has given the business a fillip up,” Carte reported.

But the greatest “fillip up” given to the entire G&S business was the building of a large (1,292 seats), modern (the first theater with electric lighting!) Savoy Theatre just off the Strand, on the site of John of Gaunt’s Savoy Palace. Patience opened the theater in October 1881, with new scenery and costumes worthy of the larger, brighter stage. Our set designer, Wendy Waszut-Barrett, an internationally renowned authority on 18th and 19th century “dry pigment” scenic painting techniques, has hand-painted the entire set using those extraordinary skills, causing the scenery to glow under shifting shades of lighting.

Sullivan conducted the premiere; his friend the Prince of Wales attended; and the Daily Chronicle reported next day, “As if by the wave of a fairy’s wand, when Carte signaled for the gaslight to be turned down, the theatre immediately became filled with a soft, soothing light, clearer and far more grateful than gas…the audience gave a cheer.”

Thus Patience became the first “Savoy” opera, as well as breaking all previous records with an initial run of 578 performances. And a new word, Savoyard, would be taken into the language for devotees and performers of Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.

Adapted from commentary by Darlene Geis, for the PBS-TV series of “The Compleat Gilbert and Sullivan: The very model of a modern major musicale.”

Heartfelt thanks to you, fellow Savoyards, for joining us for this sublime, ridiculous satire. “Love that will aye endure, though the rewards be few, That is the love that’s pure, that is the love that’s true.”

Gary Briggle

Sam Vinitsky as Reginald Bunthorne, Mallory Rahehl as Patience, and Joe Allen as Archibald Grosvenor

Patience Reviews

          Cherry and Spoon, by Jill Schafer

          Play Off the Page, by Mary Aalgaard

          Stages of Minnesota by Rob Dunkelberger

          Artfully Engaging, by Kendra Plant

Two excellent internet resources for information about Patience

Wikipedia – Patience

The Gilbert & Sullivan Archive – Patience