Once More, With Feeling

So Paul Kilmer, the Artistic Administrator of OTSL told me a story about Colin Grahm, the late and much beloved Artistic Director of same. Apparently a singer in some opera once performed an impromptu encore to a number he had just sung. Colin turned to Paul and said "Only in Gilbert and Sullivan, and then only rarely."

I've taken this as my mantra in terms of approaching the delicate and arcane art of the encore. I've always found the idea of the encore extremely artificial, and the thought of the days when pieces in operas like Madama Butterfly were encored gives me the screaming heebie-jeebies. But the whole G&S style is based in some way on artificiality. Call it theatricality if you prefer, but tomato, tomahto. The show thrives on direct address, on self-referentiality, on a slightly crackly hard candy coating of delight and detachment. And many if not most of the productions I've seen of Mikado have encored one or more numbers. So here is my big question:

At what point did encores become planned?

I can guarantee that all of these productions I've seen planned out the encores. It used to be that the audience would demand encores of certain numbers, sometimes more than one, but these days we plan ahead. Is that good or bad, I wonder?

We do have at least one planned encore, possibly two. The planning process involves making a distinction between the first and second iterations of the number--usually in terms of tempo, but sometimes in terms of blocking as well. When you plan ahead, you need to make sure you justify the encore. Of course leaving the decision whether to encore up to the audience would never work, because no one would ever yell encore. We've trained that sort of behaviour out of them. And some numbers, perhaps most notably "Here's a Howdy-Do" seem virtually written for encoring. In that case especially the number is so short on its own that a single go at it seems almost stingy. So what to do? Plan out an encore presuming (with hubris?) that the audience likes it enough to earn an encore, or let the whole tradition die out, knowing that an audience would no more call out "encore" if they like it than they would throw cabbages if they didn't. Is a puzzlement. Me, I lean on the side of doing an encore or two.

But only rarely.