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, specializing in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan (G&S).

1 History
2 School and outreach programs
3 References
4 External links

[edit] History

[edit] Early years

Albert Bergeret, formerly a longstanding member of the Barnard Gilbert and Sullivan Society, a 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 other 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. In the early years of the company, singers came from Barnard and from the semi-pro New York theatre community.

Like the other professional light opera groups that thrived at the time, (notably the Light Opera of Manhattan, which closed in the late 1980s), NYGASP at first offered modest productions. Originally called "West Side Gilbert & Sullivan Players", the group originally performed with a sound system and a cast of nine people in outdoor performances and in nursing homes around New York City with borrowed costumes and an electric piano. 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. By 1978, the company was performing full weeks runs of the operas at the 700 seat Symphony Space theatre in New York (where Bergeret was hired as that theatre's first Technical Director and Wofford as House Manager).

Bergeret was ambitious, and he wanted his company to grow. In 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. 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 New York Times and The New York Daily News, among others.

[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.

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 1983, however, NYGASP hired John Reed, the former principal comedian of the original 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 was a treat for Gilbert and Sullivan fans, to whom he was well known. His presence also attracted additional singers to NYGASP for the chance to perform with him, and he was able to impart some of his experience to company regulars.

NYGASP averaged 4 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 1990s, and it gradually produced all of the extant G&S 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 very difficult financial 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.

[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 presented a season that usually includes two or three G&S operas, at least one of which is one of the "Big Three" — H.M.S. Pinafore, Pirates or The 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 few topical references thrown in. In their Pirates production, at one point the company performs a kick-line reminiscent of A Chorus Line. But mostly they stay close to Gilbert's libretti. 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.

NYGASP continues to tour up and down the East Coast and in the Midwest of the U.S. several times each year, performing regularly at Wolf Trap in Vienna, Virginia, the Van Wezel in Sarasota, Florida, the Mann Center outside Philadelphia, and the Shubert Theater in New Haven, Connecticut, among other venues. It also offers small groups of singers for concerts, private and corporate events and outdoor performances, under the name "Wand’ring Minstrels." 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 lesser-known Sullivan music. The company is also known for annual events where company members present favorite songs in concert and there is a segment where spontaneous audience requests are played, with orchestra, and with singers chosen on the spot by the conductor. NYGASP groups have often performed on the "listening room" program on WQXR radio in New York City and has 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.

[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 also 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 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.