DVD Watch

Topsy-Turvy

If W.S. Gilbert put more than a little of himself into his song “If You Give Me Your Attention” from Princess Ida (“Ev’rybody says I’m such a disagreeable man!” goes the refrain), and filmmaker Mike Leigh admits to a special affinity for sour-faced Gilbert, what then does the transitive property of equality have to say about Leigh’s link to disagreeableness? That’s for his near and dears to say, but Topsy-Turvy, at least, couldn’t be more agreeable. Leigh’s winning and winsome 1999 film recounts the turbulent creative process of librettist Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and his longtime collaborator, composer Arthur Sullivan (Alan Corduner), to bring The Mikado to stage at D’Oyly Carte’s Savoy Theatre. Leigh takes a cue from the G&S playbook – those “low burlesques,” as Broadbent’s Gilbert describes his life’s work – with comic patter and spry pacing (no Victorian stuffed-shirtedness here), while entirely skipping on conventional story arcing. The routine tack, when dramatizing the conception and rehearsal of a stage show, would be to build to opening night and then exit stage left to thundering applause (or cut to black on a triumphant note). But Leigh upends expectations by cleverly disarranging the timeline, mixing staged scenes from a packed-house production of The Mikado with sequences that detail how each scene was built: in rehearsal with Gilbert, say, as he meticulously drills his actors on their line readings, or in the lightbulb stage, as Gilbert and his wife, Lucy (Another Year‘s Lesley Manville), roam a Knightsbridge exhibit that re-created a Japanese village. Leigh is famous for spending months developing a film from the ground up – starting with an actor, collaborating to come up with a character, improvising extensively to flesh out plot, and only then consecrating it all into a script – and I wonder if that unique process didn’t inform, if not directly inspire, Topsy-Turvy‘s scope and structure. Here, the play – magical though it may be – isn’t so much the thing as the process behind it.

Also Out Now

The Mikado (Criterion, $29.95): This 1939 Technicolor production was the first filmed version of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic masterwork, fittingly performed by the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company, the namesake troupe of the pair’s most devoted patron.

This article appears in Dome Sweet Dome.