January 14, 2004: Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance
January 14, 2004: Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance
Savoy Theatre. Matinee. Directed by Steven Dexter. Musical Supervision and arrangements by John Rigby
A production calculated — if there were really any calculation behind this guileless Weber-ized version of the old G & S classic — to make tradition-minded G & S stalwarts stomp out of the theatre in high dudgeon. The key to understanding what’s going on here is to observe that the Savoy has Pirates and J. M. Barrie’s Peter Pan playing on alternate days, with much if not all of the same cast. Anthony Head is Captain Hook in the Barrie play and, despite his inability to sing beyond the standard of provincial karaoke, the pirate King in Pirates, he seems more than a little embarrassed by the whole thing, but he soldiers on. Probably it pays well, and that’s the consolation. I haven’t seen the Peter Pan and would not waste good money on a ticket to it. What Dexter and Rigby have together conspired to do, as Dexter ingenuously explains in his program note (for the privilege of reading which I paid the current obligatory fee of £3.00), he had been taken to see G & S operas as a boy and now, grown up, thinks they need to be brought into our own place and time — not really jazzed up, mind you just … Well, jazzed up.
Fifteen seconds into the overture I knew what was up; and I quickly became, as an old theatre companion once observed, a black hole of despond, sucking all bright and cheerful things into my bottomless trough. Actually, I cheered up a little in the course of Act I, enough to stifle my impulse to leave at intermission. It actually got better as it went along, due largely to the fact that, even when re-orchestrated by someone who probably knew Joseph and the Technicolor Dreamcoat by heart and had spent plentiful time trying out various settings on his electronic keyboard, Sullivan’s music is just plain delightful. There are some things you cannot kill, and Sullivan at his best is one of them.
The fiction that Dexter makes up to give some coherence to his unwitting travesty of Pirates is that we are seeing a series of variety acts — “The Pirates of Penzance,” “Major General Stanley’s Daughters” — you get the idea. The plot meanders from on stage to backstage and on again, quite untroubled by fictional inconsistencies. The said daughters are a vaudeville act: they sing in high, little-girl voices and remove a certain amount of clothing as they sing, down to corsets and pantaloons (Dexter said he thought it was okay to introduce a little sexiness here and there). The assistant who gathers up the clothing as it falls turns out to be — Mabel! Did you guess it? I have to admit I didn’t, and was looking all over for her. There she was all along, disguised as faux-homely in black-rimmed glasses — which she perversely keeps on through the entire show (this is the popular fiction of the girl-next-door, no different from you and me, who gets lucky and falls in love with the hunk, Frederic).