Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance premiered in New York in 1879 and has been one of the most popular Savoy Operas ever since. Sullivan thought the score infinitely superior to HMS Pinafore and “tunier”.
In a letter he wrote to his mother, he said the libretto was “ingenious, clever, wonderfully funny in parts and sometimes brilliant in dialogue – beautifully written for music, as is all Gilbert does.”
The topsy-turvy libretto is a burlesque of not only swashbuckling pirates, timid policemen, romantic girls, the peerage and the army, but also of Victorian values, especially Victorian duty, opera-acrobatics, especially coloratura, Gothic melodrama, and finally patriotism and Queen Victoria.
The satire is amusing. The Pirate King (John Savournin) argues that, compared with so-called respectable professions, piracy is comparatively honest. The tender-hearted pirates, orphans to a man, turn out to be “all noblemen who have gone wrong”, which naturally makes them perfect husbands for the daughters of a modern Major-General (Richard Suart).
I enjoyed the singing. There are so many memorable melodies. But the physical comedy in Mike Leigh’s 2015 production, now revived and conducted by Natalie Murray Beale, is very weak.
The problem is that ENO’s chorus are not dancers which means the choreography has to be limited; so limited, it feels amateurish. The policemen, led by a tiny and comic sergeant (James Crewell), need to be given some comic business.
The high spot is Mabel (Isabelle Peters) making a pass at Fredric, the apprentice pirate (James Morgen). What is so witty about her performance is that she does it without any words and relies entirely on coloratura.
Why has nobody ever revived Joseph Papp’s hilarious New York Tony-award winning production, seen at Drury Lane Theatre in 1981, which turned the comic opera into a successful Broadway musical and a milestone in the history of Gilbert and Sullivan?
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