David Hyde Pierce, Ramin Karimloo, and the company of Pirates! The Penzance Musical. Photo: Joan Marcus
Funny business, the revival. Times change, and a piece decades or centuries old lands differently than it did when created. Treating a text reverently, as did Laurence Olivier’s stultifyingly static 1948 movie version of Hamlet, might fail to communicate what made that work successful in the first place. Another approach, reinterpreting through vastly different staging (think the 2006 remounting of Stephen Sondheim’s Company, where the cast does double duty as the orchestra), might bring out a different, previously unrealized aspect of the text. Then there are productions that radically reinterpret or even rewrite the original, like Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s terrific An Octoroon, which satirizes the original text’s racism with tongue-in-cheek staging.
And then there’s Pirates! The Penzance Musical, a piece so drastically different from the source material that the creative team has even discarded the title of Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 musical theater standard, The Pirates of Penzance. The production takes big chances, adding some songs and losing others, changing lyrics and dialogue, recomposing and rearranging classic numbers, eliminating primary characters, and rewriting the beginning and ending to the point that they are unrecognizable. Departing from your source material whole hog like this is risky, especially when the original is so firmly entrenched as musical theater canon. Happily, these risks pay off, and the Roundabout’s production, playing through July 27, is a thoroughly original and delightful reinvention.
The plots of both Pirates and Pirates! are the same: a morally upstanding pirate, Frederic (Nicholas Barasch Preston), has completed his apprenticeship and vows to turn his beloved piratical comrades over to the authorities. Frederic soon breaks off his engagement to his nursemaid Ruth (Jinkx Monsoon) and falls for Mabel (Samantha Williams), as the male chorus pirates vow to marry and abduct the female chorus, Mabel’s sisters, against their will. The girls’ father, Retired Major General Stanley (David Hyde Pierce) faces off against the Pirate King (Ramin Karimloo). Chaos ensues. While the original is set in the unassuming titular English port city, this incarnation takes place in New Orleans (or is it New Orlins?).
From the very beginning, Pirates! announces its disdain for tradition. Writer Rupert Holmes’s new prologue has Gilbert (Hyde Pierce) and Sullivan (normally played by Preston Truman Boyd; I saw understudy Nathan Lucrezio) detail the opera’s (true) production background, an interesting and funny entry into the Brechtian production, where the players are aware they are putting on a show. Hyde Pierce’s timing is impeccable; later, when the Pirate King realizes the Major General is responsible for his father’s death, Hyde Pierce’s response, “Nice that we can laugh about it now,” is perfect.
Holmes’s modernization creates an effective bridge between the nineteenth-century Pirates and the Roundabout’s audience, making accessible what has been preserved. If anything, it is the non-updated parts of the show, like the script’s ridicule of middle-aged nursemaid Ruth’s unattractiveness, that fall flat. The last number, “We’re All From Someplace Else,” a DEI-informed response to “He Is an Englishman,” a song from Gilbert and Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, is representative of the show’s gentle foray into the sphere political. The cast’s strength, and the audience’s, comes not from commonality but from difference.
Hyde Pierce and Ramin Karimloo, utterly magnetic as the Pirate King, are true standouts. Otherwise, the cast is good, at times great, including Jinkx Monsoon, who plays Ruth with glee, Barasch Preston as a very sincere Frederic, and Samantha Williams as a slightly less innocent Mabel—but when neither Hyde Pierce nor Karimloo are on stage, their absence is felt. Ensemble lyrics are frustratingly difficult to understand, though I can’t say if this is a sound issue or if it falls on the shoulders of the music director and performers. My proximity to the orchestra made even solo numbers challenging to make out, so I suspect sound design and acoustics are at fault.
When it comes to dancing, though, the cast shines, especially in large group numbers such as “I Am the Pirate King,” where Karimloo and the pirates execute Warren Carlyle’s demanding and imaginative choreography flawlessly while Karimloo belts out his introductory number with aplomb.
The charming orchestration by Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters incorporates many New Orleans and Caribbean musical forms. The visual counterparts, including David Rockwell’s helter-skelter set, Donald Holder’s appropriately over-theatrical lighting, and Linda Cho’s lighthearted, memorable costumes, all work in unison to highlight the play’s silly, playful side. Director Scott Ellis finds nonverbal moments great and small that express and evoke joy, such as Monsoon’s reaction when she hears the orchestra strike up for her first number, as if she’s surprised to learn she’s in a musical.
It is a theatrical event awash in glee. Whatever its shortcomings, it manages to unite the audience in a shared joyous experience in the way only theater can. In the end, all the revisions and updates bring the theatergoer closer to the experience of their 1879 counterpart seeing Gilbert and Sullivan’s original touring production—a smash hit, after all. In this spirit, the Pirates! revival is startlingly faithful to the original.