NMH Magazine : Fall 2007

Keeping Company with Gilbert & Sullivan

If you have $25,000 to spend and would like a full-scale production of The Mikado delivered to the location of your choice a week from today (orchestra, scenery, chorus, and costumes included), Albert Bergeret ’66 is your man.

“I’ll be there. I’ve got the people. It’ll happen,” he says.

Bald as an egg, bespectacled, a mile-a-minute talker who speaks in relentless bursts of fully formed sentences, he could be a character dreamed up by his beloved operetta team, W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan.

For 33 years Bergeret has been cofounder, artistic director, and general manager of the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players (NYGASP, rhymes with sigh, gasp). The company—routinely praised in New York Times theater reviews, called “the leading custodian of the G&S classics” by New York magazine—mounts several city productions every year and also takes its act on the road. Furthermore, NYGASP can be booked for smaller productions such as a five-or six-person Pirates of Penzance (with cast members, including Bergeret, doubling and tripling up on roles) or a lecture model featuring a single singer and pianist.

Bergeret’s professional goal is simple: market domination for Gilbert and Sullivan product within the United States and possibly the English-speaking world. “I want to find the resources to control the market,” he says with directorial certainty.

Not so easy, perhaps, when you’re selling Victorian comic opera to a world tuned in to American Idol and A Chorus Line. Luckily, Bergeret enjoys a good challenge. Anybody who founded a Gilbert and Sullivan company when the hippie era was still waxing, the country was in the midst of the worst recession in 40 years, and Richard Nixon was embroiled in Watergate clearly has the gift of faith—and moxie.

“It wasn’t my dream to become a producer of Gilbert and Sullivan,” says Bergeret. “I started out on the French horn.”

He grew up in Yorktown Heights, New York, the son of a design draftsman, and demonstrated a musical streak early on. He began studying piano at the age of five, took up wind instruments at eight, participated in singing groups, and throughout childhood was active in all forms of music and theater.

Arriving at Mount Hermon in 1963, Bergeret got a notice from choral director Al Raymond to come audition on a Wednesday afternoon. Because he’d been playing French horn since his voice changed, Bergeret naturally assumed he’d been summoned to an orchestra audition and took time for a quick swim first. Raymond was not impressed by his singing, which was somewhat impeded by a nose full of chlorine.

For the next two years, Bergeret played in the orchestra and listened wistfully to the various choirs. He experienced an “aha” moment when he heard the voice of a senior year roommate who was in the choir. He said to himself, “Wait a minute; I can sing better than that.” So he auditioned again, successfully this time. Later, when tryouts for Gilbert and Sullivan’s Iolanthe came along, there was no question he was qualified to be in the chorus. Al Raymond wouldn’t allow him to sing, though, because he was needed in the orchestra. Bergeret believes his career began while listening to those rehearsals. “As a result of that exposure, I fell in love with the show.” (Iolanthe remains his favorite G&S operetta to this day.)

Still nursing feelings of resentment about his thwarted G&S vocal debut, he entered Columbia University only to find the Barnard College Gilbert and Sullivan Society announcing auditions for—guess what?—Iolanthe. He was hoping to sing in the one show and get it out of his system, but instead Bergeret stayed involved with the Barnard society for ten years, singing in most of their productions, directing, designing, business managing, and generally turning his hand to whatever needed doing. (He claims less expertise in choreography than in conducting, but adds helpfully that he has done wig-making as well.) At the society, he worked closely with Jan Holland, a friend since their college days.

In 1972 Bergeret met Gail Wofford, a young Tennessean with theatrical ambitions who was working on a production for the Barnard society. She, Bergeret, and Holland began putting on Gilbert and Sullivan productions out of a truck in the park and at block parties. Their budget for the season was $35, which went toward Xeroxing flyers.

“Everything else was borrowed,” says Bergeret. “I borrowed an electric piano from the band, the sound system from a children’s theater company, and some flats from the music school. We did stuff outdoors on the backs of wagons, on street corners, and at street fairs. The next year we performed at a nursing home. And eventually an opera workshop that had a theater loaned us a Sunday afternoon.”

From such grassroots beginnings the company grew and flourished, to the point where its current budget is $1.5 million per annum. NYGASP maintains its headquarters in a small basement room in a Greek orthodox church on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.

Every year the company rents the venerable New York City Center, a 2,500-seat venue in the midtown theater district, for a two-week run in January (as of 2008, NYGASP will book an additional two weeks). They also present a New Year’s eve celebration at Symphony Space, the theater they grew up in, at Broadway and 95th. For the past 13 years, their biggest booker has been Wolf Trap, the National Park for the Arts outside Washington, DC. It seats 3,500 people under cover and many more on the lawn behind.

Despite its success, NYGASP remains in many ways a family affair. Wofford and Bergeret married in 1978; Jan Holland served as bridesmaid. Wofford designs and makes all the costumes (she taught herself to sew on the dining room table), but she doesn’t perform. “I can’t carry a tune,” she says cheerfully. An analyst in the brokerage firm Ingalls and Snyder, Wofford has always had full-time jobs in addition to working for NYGASP. For years, the company stayed afloat by using her MasterCard. The couple’s children, Genevieve ’00 and Charles Bergeret ’04, have appeared onstage in multiple NYGASP productions. Bergeret’s own tenor is put to use in a smaller entity within the company called the Wand’ring Minstrels.

As he approaches his 60s, Bergeret is grappling with questions of succession. He has no plans of retiring yet, but he worries about how best to guide the operation so it’s viable when he’s not able to do it anymore. He wonders “how to institutionalize what’s been, in some respects, over the years, a mom-and-pop operation.”

Questioned about the possibility he might overshadow his own creation, Bergeret replies, “That’s one of the problems. I can do everything, and there’s a certain sense that nobody has to do anything because they know that I’ll find a way to do it myself. There’s no incentive for them to do it. It’s founder’s disease, no question.”

Bergeret still enjoys it all, even down to signing the checks. He never tires of the G&S repertoire, even after more than three decades. In the current inimical climate, where nonprofits and theaters struggle merely to exist, having the money to sign away is a symbol of his, and his company’s, success. He continues to be motivated by taking something tangible and seeing the results of his work.

“I always say, give me a block of wood, I’ll turn it into a prop. Give me a group of people, I’ll turn them into a cast. Give me an orchestra, and we’ll make music as opposed to just playing notes.”

Asked what has been his favorite part of the multifaceted enterprise, Bergeret has an answer that’s worthy of The Mikado’s Poo-Bah, yet also endearingly honest: “Being in charge of the whole thing.”

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