Sing me your song, oh

I'm not feeling great. I marked in rehearsal today. If I'm no worse tomorrow, then I'll be ok, although it won't be fun. If I'm better, that'd be awesome. If I'm worse, there could be trouble.

I do have to sing at least a little tonight -- we're leading the audience in big choruses on the opera house stage before the show, and I'm also slated to sing Antonio in the pot luck Gondoliers. I might leave early after that, though. I'll see what Emily feels like doing -- I meet her in half an hour.

Unrelated to Buxton, Peter Zavon emailed me and pointed out that the newest edition of the Trumpet Bray is now online. (PDF here.) It includes a review by Dean Edmonds of the MIT Yeomen from May, where I played Jack Point. It's the most glowing thing I've ever read about myself, so obviously it made me feel good. Here's the part where he talks about me:

And then Jack Point (Jonathan Ichikawa) and Elsie Maynard (Colleen Dever) appeared, and this is where the show really took off. From the instant these two came on stage, the production became a scintillating masterpiece. That both have had considerable stage experience was immediately obvious, as they exhibited magnificent voices and professional acting ability. Jonathan's full and sonorous baritone made any worries about the room's acoustics disappear, and his acting rivaled that of any Jack Point I've ever seen, including that of the greatest Jack Point of all, the original D'Oyly Carte's Martyn Green. When he and Elsie came on for their famous duet, "I have a song to sing, oh," their performance was among the best renditions I can remember, and from then on, I sat up and took notice as I sort of hadn't done up until then. Jonathan's acting and dancing were outstanding, although there were one or two times when I thought his springing about the stage (at which he was a master) was just a teeny bit overdone. But his shift from broken hearted lover to professional jester in his second-act scene with Wilfred (including his rendition of one of my favorite songs, "Oh! a private buffoon is a light-hearted loon ---") was superb, and I spent a lot of time wondering how he would handle the disastrous finale.

As I have written before now, YEOMEN, which I consider to be Sullivan's real grand opera, presents a terrible problem at the end for any director. Here Jack Point, who is really the principal character in this drama, is left without a mate. If I recall correctly, this is the only G&S opera (with the exception of PATIENCE, where you're really glad there's no bride for Bunthorne) in which a major character is left so stranded. We have it on no less an authority than Katisha that "no one ever yet died of a broken heart," and I've witnessed many a director's attempt to make Point's collapse believable. Only twice have I seen it pulled off convincingly. The first time was with the consummate actor Martyn Green. The second was Jonathan's performance last Saturday. There was one added touch which helped him do it. In that last scene Elsie took off the ribbons she used to dance with when she was the merryman's maid and pressed them into Point's hands so that he could sort of crumple over them. And so once more I left the theater in tears, which is, as I've said before, the only reason why YEOMEN OF THE GUARD is not my favorite Gilbert-&-Sullivan.

I'm speechless.