Analysis
Theatre historian John Bush Jones wrote that Pinafore has "everything a musical theatregoer could ask for. An engaging and even relatively suspenseful story is populated with varied and well-drawn characters who speak and sing witty, literate, and often outrageously funny dialogue and lyrics has a score that ... has plenty of tunes for the audience to go away humming". Sir George Power, the tenor who created the role of Ralph Rackstraw, opined in later life that the secret of the success of the Savoy operas is the way in which "Sullivan entered into the spirit of Gilbert's topsy-turvy humour, and was pompous when Gilbert was sprightly, or, when Gilbert's satire was keenest and most acid, consciously wallowed in sentiment." Another commentator has suggested that the opera's enduring success lies in its focus on "mirth and silliness". Even the title of the piece is silly, applying the name of a little girl's garment, a pinafore, to the fearsome symbol of a naval warship, which usually bore names like Victory, Goliath, Audacious and Minotaur.
Read more about this topic: H.M.S. Pinafore
Famous quotes containing the word analysis:
“... the big courageous acts of life are those one never hears of and only suspects from having been through like experience. It takes real courage to do battle in the unspectacular task. We always listen for the applause of our co-workers. He is courageous who plods on, unlettered and unknown.... In the last analysis it is this courage, developing between man and his limitations, that brings success.”
—Alice Foote MacDougall (1867–1945)
“Whatever else American thinkers do, they psychologize, often brilliantly. The trouble is that psychology only takes us so far. The new interest in families has its merits, but it will have done us all a disservice if it turns us away from public issues to private matters. A vision of things that has no room for the inner life is bankrupt, but a psychology without social analysis or politics is both powerless and very lonely.”
—Joseph Featherstone (20th century)
“A commodity appears at first sight an extremely obvious, trivial thing. But its analysis brings out that it is a very strange thing, abounding in metaphysical subtleties and theological niceties.”
—Karl Marx (1818–1883)