Pondering Penzance, etc.

Although I usually show my Victorian survey a snippet of The Picture of Dorian Gray, the students otherwise find themselves faced with text instead of video. This semester, though, I'm thinking about showing a film--primarily to reward the kids for surviving Bleak House (without wishing for my spontaneous combustion, one hopes). My initial plan involved some Gilbert & Sullivan, such as this version of The Pirates of Penzance, but now I'm waffling. One of the leads is, as a singer, a very good dancer; there are some new lyrics, a few of them pretty much incomprehensible to anyone who isn't Canadian; and the whole thing is just too cute (twee?). I'm not hearing raves about any other easily available version of Pirates, which nixes that idea. Does anyone out there have suggestions for workable G&S? An Oscar Wilde play would be an obvious option--obviousness not being a problem in this context--but I don't want to sit through The Importance of Being Earnest twice in one semester. I've yet to come across a decent adaptation of either Jane Eyre or Wuthering Heights, so those are out, and the BBC Middlemarch is just too long. Good historical dramas? Mrs. Brown is hard going aside from Antony Sher. I could drag out Picnic at Hanging Rock, as long as I put it at the very end of the course; "Victorianism," after all, haunts the film. (I'm waiting on the arrival of the "Disraeli" segment from Number 10, but the series seems pretty horrifying, history-wise [scroll down].) Other ideas?

Comments

[Jason]

Topsy-Turvy: http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0151568/

[Matt Cheney]

I'd second Topsy-Turvy, not having seen any film of G&S that captures the fun of seeing a good production. I first fell in love with them through listening to a tape of patter songs put together by a devoted fan, so don't underestimate the power of simply listening to the music.