REMEMBER WHEN, ARKANSAS?

Does anyone recognize what’s happening in this vintage photo from the archives of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette?

Hint: The year was 1976.

A pluperfect Saturday scene unfolded at Marlsgate in Scott on May 22, 1976, as about 1,000 civility-seeking Arkansans picnicked or milled about on the grounds of the antique Dortch plantation.

The occasion was an outdoor performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” by the 3-year-old Arkansas Opera Theater, with about 30 local actors under the direction of Ann Chotard.

Before they could picnic and/or mill, supporters had to find Bill and Mimi Dortch’s estate, which Arkansas Gazette reviewer Bill Lewis described as an anachronism “at the end of a mile or so of very gravelly road.” Lewis saw a “very real old style plantation house” surrounded by flat, fertile and almost manicured fields, pecan and oak trees that had seen other centuries, a cypress studded lake and “an ambience right out of GWTW” — “Gone With the Wind.”

Rain spoiled the Marlsgate Opera Festival the week before, but May 22 proved sunny and clear with a refreshing breeze that swept across the fields, Lewis wrote, “carrying the dust of an occasional passing pickup truck, like a curtain across the landscape.”

The $10 tickets included soft drinks, beer and wine dispensed under canopied booths that gave a sort of “alluded Elizabethan feel” to the scene. Arkansas Symphony musicians performed here and there around the broad and shady yard.

Steve Keesee photographed Sue Taylor, symphony harpist, by the mansion steps. She was spelled from time to time by the Trumann High School madrigals; and Arkansas poet laureate Lily Peter of Marvell read her poetry.

Guests pulled up their lawn chairs and blankets for “The Mikado,” which occupied “an adequate makeshift stage set up at an angle at one corner of the looming colonnaded mansion.”

The cast included John Dougherty, Gazette assistant managing editor Carrick Patterson, Edward Barry, Ann Rice, Leslie Swindler, Mary Bowen, Eloise Hynes and audience favorite Michael Johnstone, who played the Lord High Executioner in a direct style with Southern speech patterns that heightened the comedy, Lewis wrote.

The reviewer praised their “uniform excellence” and made no reference to a professional, British production of the satirical masterpiece that AETN had broadcast that very week.