“Pirates!,” which opens tonight on Broadway, is billed as a reimagining of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 146-year-old comic operetta. But luckily there is plenty it shares with the twenty-six previous Broadway productions of “The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty.” The creative team’s noodling doesn’t get in the way of some exciting performances, such as David Hyde Pierce’s, mastering “I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major-General,” the granddaddy of all patter songs, and Ramin Karimloo’s, swashbuckling his way through “I Am The Pirate King,” leaping from the ship’s deck, sword at the ready.
The most thrilling performance for me is actually the one that Nicholas Barasch gives as Frederic, the juvenile/romantic lead, a character who sets off the deliberately silly (and mostly unchanged) plot. Having reached the age of 21, Frederic is ready to venture out into the world, leaving behind the band of tenderhearted, orphaned pirates to whom he was apprenticed as a child by mistake; his nurse Ruth misheard her master’s instructions to apprentice the boy to a pilot. Barasch thoroughly fulfills his early promise from the 2016 Broadway production of “She Loves Me” when at age 17, he portrayed the shop’s bike messenger who dreams of being a clerk. Here he is dashing and comic in equal and appropriate measure, with a swoon-worthy voice. He counts as a discovery, but one we could have seen as inevitable.
One might say something similar about Jinkx Monsoon, a two-time winner of RuPaul’s Drag Race who made her Broadway debut two years ago playing Matron “Mama” Morton in “Chicago,” the first drag queen to do so. She now seems a great comic fit for Ruth, who spends the early part of the show trying to hoodwink Frederic, who has never met any other woman, into thinking she’s a great beauty. This works, until Frederic meets Mabel Stanley (Samantha Williams) and the other young daughters of Major General Stanley.
Rupert Holmes, who won a couple of Tony Awards by fashioning Charles Dickens’s unfinished novel into “The Mystery of Edwin Drood,” is credited with having “adapted” Pirates, and is one of the four members of the creative team who “conceived” it, along with its director Scott Ellis, its music director Joseph Joubert, and Warren Carlyle, whose frenetic choreography, especially of the ensemble, helps earn the title its exclamation point. But for those of us whose main frame of reference for the show is the (now-streaming) 1983 movie starring Kevin Kline, Angela Lansbury, and Linda Ronstadt – which was director Wilford Leach’s film adaptation of his hit Broadway production – “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” seems not so much reconceived as….tweaked.
The most noticeable change is shifting the setting from an English village to New Orleans, which allows for some jazzy orchestrations (a definite benefit) and a vaguely-looking New Orleans street as part of David Rockewell’s Act I set (which didn’t do much for me — although the other major element of the Act I set, the pirate ship that glides onto the stage, made my day.)
Among the ways that Holmes has reworked the libretto is a prologue in front of the curtain featuring W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan as characters (David Hyde Pierce and Preston Truman Boyd, who is also the sergeant police.) They explain why they are debuting their new show in New Orleans; their previous work, “HMS Pinafore” resulted in many American productions, “all unlicensed and paying us no royalty whatsoever.” This way, they can be protected by American copyright laws. “The Pirates of Penzance” was indeed produced in the U.S. in 1879 for that reason (although in New York City, not New Orleans.) Gilbert and Sullivan pop up later once or twice, but their presence doesn’t much register.
The production has also interpolated five songs from three other Gilbert and Sullivan operas, sometimes changing the lyrics. But they have left the best-known songs from Penzance alone.
I checked the text of the Modern Major-General song in the new script with the libretto from the Gilbert and Sullivan archives; it was unchanged except for some slight elaboration in the response of the ensemble. But right afterwards, a pirate named Jesue now says: “We’ve been granted permission to claim the lifelong companionship of your daughters.”
To which the major general replies: “I’m taken aback by your effrontery but will try to put this affront in back of me…”
In the original, the exchange goes like this:
Sam: …we propose to marry your daughters
General: Dear me!
Was Holmes gilding refined gold, painting the lily, as Shakespeare put it? Or is he simply channeling Gilbert’s verbal dexterity? I profess neutrality.
But there is one change Holmes made that I can fully get behind. In the original, the police and the pirates are headed to a violent clash until the police sergeant calls on the pirate king to yield in the name of Queen Victoria – and the pirates prove themselves loyal to the Crown. (Ruth also reveals that the pirates are all noblemen, and they resume their “legislative duties” in the “House of Peers”. This confused me, until it occurred to me that maybe this was Gilbert’s indirect way of saying that politicians were pirates.)
But now, in place of Queen Victoria, the major general calls on the cessation of conflict in the name of…immigration. “This is the land of the clean slate, the blank canvas, the new beginning,” he says, talking about America. “With all our differences and misguided missions, there’s only one thing that unites all of us who live here.”
“And what’s that,” the Pirate King asks.
To the tune of “He is an Englishman” from HMS Pinafore, the Major General leads the company in singing
“We’re all from someplace else…
The result of this migration
To a patchwork, scratchwork nation
Is we all are somethin’ else….
And the human race could well embrace
That we all trace from someplace else.”
It occurred to me that maybe Holmes, too, was saying something indirectly about politicians.
Pirates! The Penzance Musical
Roundabout’s Todd Haimes Theater through July 27
Running time: Two hours and 15 minutes, including an intermission
Tickets: $72 – $382
Music by Arthur Sullivan; Libretto by W. S. Gilbert; Adapted by Rupert Holmes; Music orchestrated by Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters; Dance arrangements by John O’Neill; Musical Director: Joseph Joubert;
Directed by Scott Ellis; Choreographed by Warren Carlyle; Conceived by Scott Ellis, Rupert Holmes, Warren Carlyle and Joseph Joubert
Scenic Design by David Rockwell; Costume Design by Linda Cho; Lighting Design by Donald Holder; Sound Design by Mikaal Sulaiman; Hair and Wig Design by Charles G. LaPointe; Make-Up Design by Ashley Ryan
Cast: Ramin Karimloo (Pirate King), Jinkx Monsoon (Ruth), David Hyde Pierce (Gilbert/Major General Stanley), Nicholas Barasch (Frederic), Preston Truman Boyd (Sullivan/Police Sergeant) and Samantha Williams (Mabel Stanley). Kelly Belarmino, Maria Briggs, Cicily Daniels, Ninako Donville, Alex Dorf, Rick Faugno, Niani Feelings, Tommy Gedrich, Alex Gibson, Afra Hines, Dan Hoy, Ryo Kamibayashi, Tatiana Lofton, Nathan Lucrezio, Shina Ann Morris, Tyrone L. Robinson, Cooper Stanton, and Bronwyn Tarboton
Photographs by Joan Marcus
