W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the operetta kings of 19th-century Britain, had a hit in America with “H.M.S. Pinafore,” but they reaped no American fortune from it. Instead, lacking U.S. copyright protection, their glorious piffle spread in the States like spring colds, causing fits of laughter but returning no royalties. By the time the team from London arrived in Manhattan in late 1878, bringing the real thing with them, 15 pirate productions were already running.
Is it any wonder that their next operetta, in 1879, was called, with a wink, “The Pirates of Penzance”? And that they opened it in New York instead of London to avoid the financial fate of “Pinafore”? Gilbert and Sullivan were sharp satirists but also savvy businessmen.
More than any of their 13 other so-called Savoy operas, “Pirates” has borne that out, returning to Broadway regularly ever since. (The Public Theater’s 1981 revival, starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, ran longer than any previous production anywhere.) For a work so old, in such a seemingly passé genre, whose touchstones and targets are literally Victorian, that’s astonishing: a tribute to the resilience of Gilbert’s words, the delight of Sullivan’s music and our willingness to make common cause with the past.
Though jolly enough, the latest Broadway incarnation, which opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, trusts neither the material nor us as much as it might. Clumsily but accurately retitled “Pirates! The Penzance Musical,” and transported to post-Reconstruction New Orleans, it is also significantly altered in tone. Except for the central performance by David Hyde Pierce, marvelously underplaying the tongue-twisting Major-General, the production has a sweaty quality, bordering on frenzy, that’s hopelessly at odds with the cool wit of the original.
Perhaps the sweat is a nod to the story’s steamy new location, or a sign of the effort it took to get it there. As adapted by Rupert Holmes, and directed by Scott Ellis, “Pirates” now takes place in a French Quarter theater — a clever touch, given Louisiana’s historic proximity to actual piracy, but one that requires laborious workarounds and, apparently, an uplifting lesson.
Piffle is better light than heavy, and preferably without a moral. Indeed, there is something essentially dry about the original operetta, whose tricky, twitty humor marks the beginning of a line that extends to Monty Python and beyond. The pirates score no plunder because their king (Ramin Karimloo) is sentimental about orphans, being one himself, and “word has gotten around.” (Their intended victims are all mysteriously parentless.) The craven police are less than heartened when Mabel (Samantha Williams), the comeliest of the Major-General’s daughters, sings them rousingly into battle: “Go ye heroes, go and die!”
Such nonsense isn’t just decorative, it’s structural, turning the plot. As a child, Frederic (Nicholas Barasch) was supposed to be apprenticed to a pilot until his 21st birthday, but his nurse, Ruth (Jinkx Monsoon), misheard the instruction, apprenticing him instead to a pirate.
Years later, on the last day of his indenture, anticipating his marriage to Mabel, he receives bad news from the jealous Ruth. Having been born, she says, in a leap year, on Feb. 29, he has celebrated only five birthdays. A self-described slave to duty, he resolves to remain with the pirates as specified, asking Mabel if she’d mind waiting the 60-some years to wed him.
“It seems so long,” she sings.
Those jokes still work, but not everything survives the long journey from the original setting on the sleepy Cornwall coast. In particular, Gilbert’s primary satire, of the English gentry, is unsalvageable. Only in Britain could his resolution make sense, when it is revealed that the pirates are “all noblemen who have gone wrong”: “With all their faults, they love their queen.”
Instead, taking cues from the Creole culture of New Orleans, Holmes steers the plot toward an uplifting if unconvincing new finale invoking the idea of America as “a patchwork, scratchwork nation” of immigrants. That nifty phrase notwithstanding, his lyrics, supplanting perhaps half the originals, are rarely as neat and thus rarely as funny as Gilbert’s.
Sullivan fares better. Though his style is typically formal and foursquare — we get a hit of his hymn “Onward, Christian Soldiers” at the start — music is inherently more flexible than words. Flexible enough to make Sullivan swing, though?
Well, yes. The heavy rejiggering of the “Pirates” songs (as well as borrowings from “Pinafore,” “The Mikado” and “Iolanthe”) has been exceptionally well managed to honor the city’s melting pot of influences. Scents of jazz, blues, Dixieland, boogie-woogie, soft-shoe, calypso, rag and rumba waft by in catchy new arrangements. (The music director is Joseph Joubert; he and Daryl Waters devised the orchestrations.) I was too sonically satisfied to mind the unlikeliness, in a quasi-classical work, of a finale featuring an orchestra of washboards.
It is not a non sequitur to mention here Karimloo’s athletic performance, hanging off a galleon and leaping over barrels (sets by David Rockwell) in abs-baring costumes by Linda Cho. Monsoon’s Ruth, enhanced with an unnecessary second-act number from “The Mikado,” is more saloon wench than nursemaid, but her turn is rowdy camp fun nonetheless. Williams’s Mabel is as fetching and beamish as Donald Holder’s colorful lighting, and the ensemble, especially when performing Warren Carlyle’s choreography, is very hard-working.
That’s fine, if not very operetta. I wish Ellis’s direction had taken more direction from Pierce’s pickled deadpan; with his absurd facial hair (by Charles G. LaPointe) and rum-blossom nose, he needs little else to get his laughs. Really, the less he does the funnier it is, because his stillness helps us focus on the words, which are otherwise too often difficult to discern in this production. For once, that can’t be blamed on the sound design, which Mikaal Sulaiman has mercifully kept at moderate volume. The problem is that the musical-theater style of the adaptation is not ideally suited to the density of Gilbert’s verse.
Despite such mismatches between the original and the remake, “Pirates!” is still a feather in the tricorn of the Roundabout Theater Company, which produced and nurtured it. Operettas don’t last 146 years just because they’re good. (I love Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Ruddigore” too, but have never seen it except at camp.) Longevity like that requires faith not only in the past but also in the future.
So if “Pirates!” finds a forever home, or even just a temporary one, in New Orleans — celebrating “the land of the clean slate, the blank canvas, the new beginning,” as the Major-General declares in his new peroration — so be it. Even those savvy Savoyards might approve.
Pirates! The Penzance Musical
Through July 27 at the Todd Haimes Theater, Manhattan; roundabouttheatre.org. Running time: 2 hours 15 minutes.
