Object All Sublime

In the gallery of the House of Commons one afternoon last week, a snap-eyed, tart-tongued spinster in electric blue coat and homemade pink wool beret craned triumphantly forward to watch Oxford M.P. Lawrence Turner step forward with a handsomely curlicued petition. Pointing to two brown paper parcels full of signatures, Turner started to read: "Regretting the innovations already being introduced and fearing that further mutilations will take place when the copyright expires in the Year of our Lord 1961, we . . . humbly pray that steps will be taken to perpetuate the copyrights in some public cultural body . . ." Occasion: the climax of a four-year campaign by Oxford's Dorothy May Alderley, 72, to preserve the operas of Gilbert & Sullivan from modern desecration.

Nanki-Poo Presley. A sometime contralto in G. & S. amateur productions, Petitioner Alderley was badly shaken four years ago to learn that the British copyright on W. S. Gilbert's lyrics would expire in 1961 (the copyright on Sullivan's music lapsed in 1950). She promptly withdrew to her little Oxford bedsitting room, and for ten hours each day sat scrawling appeals to Gilbert & Sullivan fans the world over, requesting their signatures for the petition she was preparing for Parliament. Seared into her mind were reported visions of Mike Todd's Hot Mikado with Katisha as an opulent, raucous blues singer, and of a Los Angeles Yum-Yum yodeling "stark naked in her bath." Soon Crusader Alderley began to get reports from the U.S. (where G. & S. operas are not protected by copyright) detailing even more flagrant abominations: a "gutbucket" Mikado with a "hula-hooping" chorus, a "disgusting performance" of Patience with "Bunthorne played as a pansy."

The possibilities for further desecration, as Miss Alderley envisioned them, were endless: Frank Sinatra as the defendant in Trial by Jury, charged with stealing a pizza pie; The Gondoliers remade into The Road to Venice, with Bing Crosby and Bob Hope. It was even suggested to Dorothy Alderley that Elvis Presley might play Nanki-Poo. Snapped she: "I'd Nanki-Poo him if I could get my hands on him!"

Throw Out the Cliches. From all over the world the letters poured in (one addressed simply to "Gilbert & Sullivan Purity Champion, Oxford"). As her fame grew, she took to rapping the prestigious productions of the D'Oyly Carte troupe (a recent D'Oyly Carte Gondoliers, she announced, was "shocking: Marco came on wearing jodhpurs"). By last week Crusader Alderley had 500,000 signatures to bolster her parliamentary petition.

Although many G. & S. buffs feel that the operas can only benefit from the removal of copyright restrictions ("Throw out the petition!" wrote one newsman. "Every last cliche, comma and full stop of it!"), Purist Alderley was more determined than ever to protect W. S. Gilbert from the depredations of popular arrangers. One, last week, even wanted to give lolanthe a "honkytonk beat" and retitle it Zaza Has a Piazza.

With a sense of deep emotion,

I approach this painful case;

For I never had a notion

That a man could be so base.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.