Review: Pirates of Penzance
Here, in my tradition of reviewing plays when it\’s already too late for my readers to see them, is my estimation of The Guthrie Theater\’s just-ended production of Gilbert and Sullivan\’s \”Pirates of Penzance.\”
My familiarity with \”Pirates of Penzance\” had, until Friday, extended only to Barney\’s rendition, while doing backflips, of the show\’s hit song (Deep Space Homer -1f13).
In truth, that would have been enough. As with many classic works of art, a brief pop culture reference – on the Simpsons or, in earlier years, Duck Tales – has been enough. Like my eleven-year-old brother said when he saw the bust of Cleopatra in the British National Museum, \”Oh, I know her, she was on an episode of Loony Toons.\”
The Pirates of Penzance, let\’s not kid ourselves, is never going to be in the British Museum. Nonetheless, the play has been become enough a part of pop culture that, even without having seen it, I knew a little about it.
I knew, for example, that nearly every male character in the play has the apparent sexual orientation of Nathan Lane in \”The Bird Cage\”. That doesn\’t bother me; a) I find it quite progressive for a piece that premiered in 1880 and b) it was fitting since the next day the 32nd annual Twin Cities Pride Festival was being held in Loring Park, just a block away.
I also knew, however, that Pirates of Penzance is a musical – a narrative form that has always infuriated me with its random singing and dancing. Why are these people singing to each other, I always wonder. What is the purpose of all this synchronized dancing?
But while I generally hate musicals, I liked Pirates of Penzance. The story, and I ask old G & S to forgive me when I say this, is terrible (here\’s a summary). Something about Pirates wanting to marry the daughters of a major general (yes, the very model of a). But, as I said, it\’s hard to understand why they want to, since they don\’t seem to, um, swashbuckle that way.
I can\’t comment on the lyrics, since I understood about ten percent of them. They sounded very clever, in the same way that a chalkboard filled with math equations looks very clever. But, not knowing what any of it means, it\’s hard to tell just how clever it really is. What if the only real English words they were using were the rhyming ones at the end of the phrases, and the rest were gibberish? I had no way of telling, but that\’s probably a defect on my part.
The singing was kind of a cross between opera and tongue twisters, which is actually more impressive than it sounds. The standouts were the Baldwin sisters, Christina and Jennifer, whom I loved even more as the leads in \”Carmen\” at the Theatre de la Jeune Lune. The rest of the cast was also good, if slightly less pretty, and everyone was just brimming with enthusiasm (a remarkable feat on the last weekend of a long run).
But the staging was what made this musical a winner, and you knew it in the first five minutes of the show. That\’s when, during a sleepy, hilarious opening ballad by a Sullivan look-alike, the famous pirates make their entrance. They come flying out of the rafters, over the balconies, swinging from the ceiling and crawling through the aisles. Those first five minutes seem more like a circus than a musical, which makes the fact that they\’re singing (although who knows about what) that much more impressive.
The whole production is staged with this kind of high-flying enthusiasm. It\’s almost as if the director and choreographer knew the inane plot of this late 19th century vaudeville wouldn\’t sustain us modern, high-society types, so they packed it full of fun stuff, like back-flips (more than I ever thought I\’d see at the Guthrie).
And guess what? It works. By the time Queen Victoria drops from the sky in a hot-air-balloon, the audience is pretty much in hysterics, whether or not they\’ve understood more than five minutes of the singing. And when, during the curtain call, the Sergeant of the Police comes out break-dancing, the audience\’s applause is so compulsively rhythmic that you might think you were at the Fitzgerald Theater watching the end of \”A Prairie Home Companion.\”
Except it\’s different, because the All-Star Shoe Band has been replaced by a dozen agile, shirtless men and Garrison Keilor suddenly looks very good in a busty Victorian gown. And there\’s two of him.
So really, not that different at all.
Related:
Oh, there\’s so much related stuff out there, I don\’t know where to start. Briefly:
- The whole musical in MIDI
- The Pioneer Press\’ review
- The Guthrie study guide
- And best of all, a list of parodies of the \”Major General\” song, with my favorite, by Yacko, Wacko, and Dot, of the Animaniacs (see, all you ever needed to know about the classics, on afternoon cartoons).