ARTS
Tuesday, April 17,1990

The Michigan Daily

Page 5

9.

...Continued
lolanthe rises to musical heights
Gilbert and Sullivan works have the potential to be deceptive. It is
not real "high art" in the sense of Puccini or Wagner, but the music can
be just as beautiful as that of any of the acknowledged masters. The
University Gilbert and Sullivan Society demonstrated this characteristic
well in Iolanthe this weekend. The opera singing was beautiful and
strong, and aside from a couple moments of faltering, the entire cast
sounded extremely professional.
While the singing was good, the acting was not quite as consistent.
Most of the stars did a credible job, but the star who outshone them all
was Nicole Navee as Iolanthe. She began slowly, (a weakness that could
have been due to the music itself) and wavered back and forth from se-
rious to tragic to comic as Iolanthe was uncovered from her seaweed ex-
ile. She began to become the only substantial emotional figure in the
second half, and one could see by the time she revealed herself to her hus-
band that neither the Lord Chancellor or her son Strephon deserved such a
woman. She is a poignant figure, but somehow her plight never drags
down the satire that Iolanthe should be.
The best comic performances came from several quarters. Beverly
Pooley shone in the role of the bewigged Lord Chancellor, and no less
amusing were the characters of Lord Tolloler and Lord Mountararat, flaw-
lessly played by Jeffery Smith and Eric Gibson respectively. The evening
was almost stolen by the one character who was most out of place and
had the least lines, Private Willis, played by Matthew Grace. There was
nothing so funny in the entire, exceedingly well-done second act that
outdid the moment when the Queen of the Fairies turned Willis into a
fairy, and little triangular wings popped up from behind his stoutly filled
red Grenadier Guards uniform. It is often true that characters with few
lines are not given much attention, but Grace did an outstanding job with
the few scenes he had on stage. I have never seen so few words gather so
many laughs.
Aside from the comic actors, though, the acting was weak. The voices
were good, but there was no great effort put in humor or intensi-
See REVIEW, page 8

Tanita Tikaram
The Sweet Keeper
Reprise
Tanita Tikaram is an exponent of
the kind of late teen "poetry" that be-
longs in an English boarding school
for girls. Half Malaysian, half Fi-
jian, she's grown up in England lis-
tening to too many old Mary Hop-
kin albums. Her voice is rich and
whiskey-soaked - a voice that
seems to have experience written
all over it, but is too burnished in
the context of dull songs.
The ditties on The Sweet Keeper
are vague, airy and impossible to pin
down; Tikaram seems to be wilfully
obscure in an effort to give her
songs the veneer of art. Where
Sindad O'Connor bares it all,
Tikaram does the dance of the seven
veils, concealing much in a series of
cryptic comments and verbal teases.
The songs are swathed in folky
arrangements ranging from the
straightforwardly Celtic to the more
jazzy; there's some cute violin play-
ing as well as the odd decent tune,
but Rod Argent's production is too
lumpy and lacks any kind of person-
ality. What's more, the words are
plain silly. One wonders whether
Tikaram is singing suburban love
paeans to garden gnomes or crooning
about muffins and Earl Grey. Check
this out: "Nicety is something
which hangs around this stage/ Be-
lieve me when I tell you you can act
around it/ Mewl and puke about it/ I
don't want to hurt you/ I just want

to join in/ This is kindly creamer/ A
kindly crematorium." Yep, these
lyrics sound like mid-'70s Genesis,
and are so frustrating that you just
want to whisk the dear lady away to
an Indian restaurant and get her to
explain them over "a steaming vin-
dao.
But this music is more appropri-
ate for vegetarian restaurants in
South Kensington. It's too bloody
polite, too English in the stuffiest,
uptight way, and needs more blood
in it.
-Nabeel Zuberi
Soul II Soul
"Get a Life" (12")
Virgin
This is a fair example of what
prompted people to call Keep on
Movin' boring - while a large part
of that album contained soothing,
subtle, low-key soul, the kind that
you listen to while you're chillin'
on the front porch or street corner,
not dancing, "Get a Life" is constant
stimulation, basically an ingenious,
engaging piece of rap/dance/soul/
R&B fusion. Or perhaps this one
simply has a different color. Jazzie
B. raps in a nonchalant manner of
speech, his attractive accent adding
to the mellow spectrum of the piece
while a chorus of children chime in:
"What's the meaning? What's the
meaning of life?"
Helping the euphoric power of
the piece are various references to the
earlier singles, another perfectly

Tanita Tikaram sings well, but in her lyrics she doesn't quite manage to
transcend a certain adolescent sense of the poetic.

crafted techno beat, a bit of the old
"Feel Free" piano; flutes and strings
humming in and out of the groove,
and a female singer: "elevate your
mind, free your soul... feel the feel-
ing, let your body take control." The
track is not available on album yet,
and may actually be better than the

entire first album by itself.
"Get an objective, get a directive,
become an asset to the collective,"
he rhymes. In his subtle, flavored,
considerably non-offensive way,
Jazzie B. is telling his audience to
See RECORDS, page 8

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