13 June 2009: Gilbert and Sullivan and Greenberg and Benjamin and Daniel, Pirate
13 June 2009: Gilbert and Sullivan and Greenberg and Benjamin and Daniel, Pirates (or, Gilbert and Sullivan Plundered)
Matinee. Original book and lyrics by W. S. Gilbert. Original music by Arthur Sullivan. Conceived by Gordon Greenberg, Nell Benjamin, and John Daniel. Additional book and lyrics by Nell Benjamin. Music supervision and arrangements by John McDaniel. Choreography by Denis Jones. Orchestrations by Dan DeLange. Directed by Gordon Greenberg. Huntington Theatre Company. Originally produced by Goodspeed Opera House; subsequently produced by Paper Mill Playhouse.
I went to see this spoof of The Pirates of Penzance not knowing whether I would hate it or love it. I ended up loving it — actually, I loved it from the very first moment. This G&S opera has been made into a marvelous take-off from the original. At the same time, it becomes its very own thing, a wonderful combination of comic opera, modern musical theater, and (I’m told) a series of four films by Disney called Pirates of the Caribbean. I did a little Googling on this title and looked at one or two trailers; as far as I can see, it is vintage Disney stuff, full of first-rate camerawork and lacking even the smallest of ideas. But I saw enough to see that the adapters of this original comic opera must have had the kind of audience in mind that would go to see this Disney series, and yet would also include in their auditorium plenty of seats for people who have seen, sung, and know by heart the big repertoire of comic opera produced by Gilbert and Sullivan, still alive and well upwards of 125 years after they first reached the stage. That’s a nice trick, if you can do it, to put together an adaptation of a well-known favorite that appeals to and ends up mightily pleasing a broad and varied audience. You can understand why the Huntington management decided to bring this crowd-pleaser to Boston. I haven’t looked at any of the reviews, but I suspect that they have a lot of high praise in them for the quality of this production and also for the way it appeals to and satisfies its audience.
In this production the Pirate King, played with wonderful sangfroid by Steve Kazee, is perhaps done more in the spirit of the modern film hero, or villain-hero, of popular action films than the villain-hero of G. & S. opera. Somehow that didn’t matter. The Pirate King’s accomplices all look the part of pirates, some with bandannas wrapped around their heads, and the actors (let’s call them actor-singers) are as expert at dancing and gymnastics as they are at singing. Vocally, perhaps the high point of the first act was the rousing chorus of “Hail, Poetry” that brings the proceedings for the moment to a complete stop.
There is a lot of updating of Victorian ideas and values in this musical version of Pirates. The first one we notice, perhaps, is that the character of Ruth is dressed not in period costume but in much abbreviated girl-pirate clothing, of the sort that Oscar Wilde, in quite another context