THE TORONTO STAR
Friday, May 4, 2001 Section C

Leo, The Royal Cadet ably cast
By William Littler

Canada's first mega-hit? Forget about your Paul Ankas, your Anne Murrays and your Shania Twains and prepare to salute Leo, The Royal Cadet.

And if you turn up at the St. Lawrence Centre's Jane Mallett Theatre between now and Sunday, you can expect Leo, in his bright red jacket and pillbox cap, to salute right back at you.

Yes after decades of snoozing on a library shelf, Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann's vintage 1889 "military opera" has returned to active theatrical duty at the enterprising hands of Toronto Operetta Theatre, looking and sounding every bit like the proudly British colonial artifact it once was.

Review

A man about Kingston music, who led orchestras, founded a music school and even built violins on the side, Telgmann was a largely self-taught composer with the wit to root his exercise in colonial Gilbert and Sullivan in his own back yard.

Raising the curtain on picnic grounds outside the Royal Military College, he and his local librettists, George and Charles Cameron, used the cadets as their subject matter, with the amorous, patriotic Leo as a hero who would set the mold into which a whole platoon of subsequent Canadian bravehearts, from Nelson Eddy's cinematic mounties to Paul Gross's telegenic Constable Brenton Fraser, would eventually squeeze.

Propositioned by Captain Bloodswigger to accept the challenge of the military life, Leo parts from his beloved Nellie and her delicious pumpkin pie to fight the Zulus in distant Natal (talk about irony: next door, in the Bluma Appel Theatre, Athol Fugard's The Island was simultaneously portraying a very different South Africa from a native point of view).

It is much to the credit of director Guillermo Silva-Marin that he allowed the leopard-skinned, spear brandishing Zulus a measure of dignity, instead of making them the music hall characters they might well have been on the stage of Martin's Opera House back in 1889.

Or were they? "Now for justice," the aria of the Zulu King Ketchko (an actual historical figure), sounded entirely serious when Richard Shaw sang it. Perhaps Telgmann and his librettists may have been less racist than their mentors, Gilbert and Sullivan.

Not that this version of Leo, The Royal Cadet presents all the evidence. In order to make the piece stageworthy for modern audiences, Virginia Reh has adopted libretto, conflating its four acts into two and eliminating eight of the 17 characters.

In its slimmed down form, the plot moves along swiftly, tells a simple story legibly and survives without needing to be camped up. Even the battle scene has been cleverly choreographed and danced in a stylized manner as a two-step rather than fought in a cartoon manner by the opposing sides.

(LEO) probably sounds more sophisticated now than it did when its composer wrote it, thanks to John Greer's replacement of the missing orchestrations with those of his own (inventively written for a Benjamin Britten chamber opera sized ensemble of 13).

Greer, who also conducts has given the operetta a stronger finale by adding the Faerie Opera one of the characters, the lisping poet Wind, talks incessantly about writing throughout the plot.

Basing the music for it on a Victorian salon song by Roscoe and Codman, he even includes witty allusions to the Windsor Forest scene of Verdi's Falstaff along the way.

With an able cast, strongly headed by Eric Shaw's Leo and Alexandra Lennox's Nellie, and including Kevin Power as Wind, Luc LaLonde as Captain Bloodswigger, Gisèle Fredette as Caroline and Bruce Kelly as Colonel Hewett, this is probably as splendid a re-creation of Leo, The Royal cadet as we could have hoped for. But it does demonstrate how good Gilbert and Sullivan really were.

THE GLOBE AND MAIL
Saturday, May 5, 2001

Everyone loves a Victorian in uniform
Reviewed by Urjo Kareda

There can't be any other operettas set in both Kingston, Ont., and Isandlwana, Africa, as Oscar Ferdinand Telgmann's Leo, The Royal Cadet is, but its locations are the least of its historical interest. The work was premiered in Kingston in 1889, "under the Patronage of the Commandant and Staff, and Gentleman Cadets of the Royal Military College, " and went on to tour, in Canada and the United States. By 1925, it had totalled over 1,700 performances.

Leo, The Royal cadet, in the Toronto Operetta Theatre's winning production (launched at the Jane Mallett Theatre on Thursday), returns to Kingston next week, with the Royal Military College once again a sponsor. And, it's unlikely these days to duplicate its earlier popularity, it certainly deserves a heartfelt salute.

The operetta is a diorama of late-Victorian attitudes about valour, duty, the military and the fight on behalf of the Queen against the "Zulu devils." The central story couldn't be simpler: we see Leo become a cadet, go to Africa to fight the Zulus, and return home victorious to claim the girl who never wanted him to be a soldier. The charm of the piece lies with Telgmann's eclectic instincts for tunes; his music ranges from tactful sentiment to lively comic material, all with short spans and delightful invention.

Leo is jammed with novelty items and odd characters. there is the fey writer Wind ("I am Wind, Wind the poet. And the whole world doth know it"). busily at work on his Faerie Opera (or as actor Kevin Power's choice of speech affectation transformed it, a "Faewie Opewa"). There is also the pair of professors at the Royal Military College, a German and a Frenchman, who perform a duet based entirely on racial clichés.

The first act, a long picnic in Kingston, with guests who have come all the way from Gananoque, features a ribbon dance, a lovely unaccompanied chorale, several rousing military-enlistment songs, and a love-song dedicated to a pumpkin pie. The second act includes a stirring anthem for Ketcho, the Zulu chief, as well as a pantomime battle, before we return home to Kingston and a final reprise of Glory and Victory!

The Toronto Operetta Theatre does the work a favour by not trying to make too much of it. They retain its innate sweetness while goosing up its fun. The production hero is John Greer, who not only conducted so lovingly, but also adopted the orchestrated Telgmann's score; the original arrangement had been destroyed in flood in the composer's home in 1925. Greer's approach is affectionate and witty, with a gentle understanding of how the music must have beguiled its first audience. In addition to droll quotes from Mozart and Verdi, Greer also invented a sequence from the Faerie Opera, missing entirely from the original. Librettist Virginia Reh has done some comparably canny tweaking of the text.

Guillermo Silva-Marin's staging, too, mixes fondness with a delicate mockery. The company can afford few visual resources, but the rented costumes were pretty, and such challenges as the Zulu battle were imaginatively solved. The chorus did unusually focused work: the ensemble of cadets achieved a truly stouthearted sound, and the bevy of maidens had true allure.

Eric Shaw provided a wonderful Leo, his clarion tenor making the most of both the big sentimental tune (The days of long ago) and the call to battle (To the field!); his decent, straightforward presence anchored the show. Other notable work came from Luc LaLonde as the amusingly puffed-up Captain Bloodswigger, Alexandra Lennox as the faithful Nellie, Gisèle Fredette as her more savvy friend, and Ian Charles McAndrew, who recalled W. C. Fields as a swaggering town-gent (or, as the operetta's vocabulary puts it, a Dude). Leo, The Royal Cadet may be Toronto Operetta Theatre's finest evening.