Ahead of his time...Noel Coward's Bitter Sweet

[skynyc]

I had a wonderful opportunity to go up to Bard College in Annondale-on-Hudson yesterday to see a production of this Noel Coward operetta which is very seldom performed. I was originally drawn to it by the news that it was featuring Sian Phillips, (most recently on Broadway in a one-woman Marlene Dietrich play, and famously as Livia, Derek Jacobi's scheming mother in I, Claudius.) The show's promotions also boasted that it featured some of Coward's most famous songs: "If Love Were All", "I'll See You Again", and "Zigeuner".

 

The show was a mixed bag, with most of the deficits squarely in the hands of the director, some of whose pacing was positively glacial, and who oddly moved the setting from the 1880s and 1920s, to the 1920s and 1960s. Seeing as the sections originally set in the 1880s took place in Vienna and featured primarily operetta-like waltzes, these tunes didn't land so easily in the 1920s settings.

 

But the assets of the production greatly outweighed the rest, as the voices were terrific, and the simple set was effective and the costumes attractive. (I won't even go on about the other major detraction, the wigs.) I really loved the show itself and the music was wonderful. Had this been in town, I would probably have gone to the theater to see it again today for it's closing performance.

 

Seeing as this closed today, you may wonder why I bring it up here...but I do have a point.

 

There is a number sung by four men as a spoof of Oscar Wilde that has the most outrageously gay song written up to that time, and this song is credited by many to be part of the origin of "Gay" being used as a term for homosexuals.

 

Thanks to the internet, I can present the lyrics here:

 

Blasé boys are we

Exquisitely free

From the dreary and quite absurd

Moral views of the common herd

We like porphyry bowls

Chandeliers and stoles

We're most spirited, carefully filleted souls

 

Pretty boys, witty boys, too, too, too

Lazy to fight stagnation

Haughty boys, naughty boys, all we do

Is to pursue sensation

The portals of society are always open'd wide

The world our eccentricity condones

A lot of quaint variety we're certain to provide

We dress in very decorative tones

Faded boys, jaded boys, wormankind's

Gift to a bulldog nation

In order to distinguish us from less

enlightened minds

We all wear a green carnation

 

Pretty boys, witty boys, you may sneer

At our disintegration

Haughty boys, naughty boys, dear, dear, dear

Swooning with affectation

Our figures sleek and willowy

Our lips incarnadine

May worry the majority a bit

But matrons rich and billowy

Invite us out to dine

And revel in our phosphorescent wit

Faded boys, jaded boys, come what may

Art is our inspiration

And as we are the reason for the

nineties being gay

We all wear a green carnation

 

I also found this version on Youtube of a montage of clips taken from the British TV production of Jeeves and Wooster.

 

 

So thanks to Mr. Coward, and thanks to all of you who celebrate the Green Carnation lifestyle.