Hope in a Black Box Theater

At DeSales University these past several weeks, John Bell, Chairman of Performing and Fine Arts, has been directing "The Mikado," that classic Gilbert and Sullivan opera that, though first performed in London in 1885, prevails as comedy and satire even now. (Who today could not, for example, assemble 'a little list' of people 'who would not be missed' for the Lord High Executioner?) With the opera staged in DeSales' black b0x theater, those who were privileged to see the sold-out show sat at the very edge of a fine flirtation. Performers. Audience. Magic.

I grew up in a household where musicals ruled—"The Music Man," "The Sound of Music," "Windjammer." I knew the words to all the songs, my brother (a preternaturally gifted whistler) accompanied, and no couch was safe from being stood upon as we, in our turn, took the stage. It was what we did instead of most things. It taught me respect for the form.

Bell is a choreographer and composer in addition to being a chairman and director, and sitting there in the audience on Friday night it was impossible not to notice how brilliantly he and his students volumized that show—wheels of color on the painted floor, stacking boxes to give the actors height, parasols to catch and convey the sweet-hued light, percussive fans. With hardly more than a piano, a triangle, a gong, those snapped-fast fans, a rap-like dance, the sneak of new lyrics inside old tunes, this "Mikado" was a contemporary triumph.

Most of all it was a triumph for the freshmen, sophomores, juniors, seniors who were given the chance to make it their own.

You watch a performance like "The Mikado" on a campus like DeSales beside John and his (tremendously wonderful and talented) wife, Andra, and the mess of stock markets, housing markets, politics, fear fades for awhile; hope creeps in. Here are artists, you think. Here is the work that they yield. Here is their joy in yielding. Here is the light beyond the tangle of now.