Review: Pirates! The Penzance Musical, a Jambalaya With Too Many Cooks

Piracy was rampant in the 19^th century. Not the swashbuckling Jack Sparrow kind; the high tide of Caribbean piracy had receded by the time William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan debuted their blockbuster operetta, The Pirates of Penzance, on New Year’s Eve, 1879. But the wanton plunder of intellectual property (specifically of their earlier hit, H.M.S. Pinafore) by piratical American producers had convinced the British songwriters to debut their newest work at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York, to be better protected by the copyright laws of this still-wild country.

That real historical fact provides the inspiration for Pirates! The Penzance Musical, a new adaptation by Rupert Holmes (The Mystery of Edwin Drood) that imagines the New Orleans leg of a national tour led by Gilbert and Sullivan themselves, for which they had the stamina to rearrange large sections of the score as Dixieland jazz.

This delightfully anachronistic concept offers the opportunity for cultural alchemy, blending styles and sensibilities across time and borders to create musical comedy bliss. This has been done successfully with Gilbert and Sullivan before. Unfortunately, this attempt is thwarted by a one-two punch of timidity and smarm.

At the top we are greeted by Gilbert (David Hyde Pierce) and Sullivan (Preston Truman Boyd), who set the stage for what we’re about to witness. A city with a colorful history of transplants, some of them actual pirates, New Orleans is the ideal spot for Frederic (Nicholas Barasch in excellent voice) to retire from the trade. It’s the eve of his 21^st birthday, when he will be released from his apprenticeship to the Pirate King (Ramin Karimloo, appropriately dashing and absolutely drenched in sweat). Frederic’s nurse, Ruth (Jinkx Monsoon), was supposed to hook him up with a respectable tugboat pilot, but she misunderstood the assignment.

Frederic is a slave of duty, so he dutifully informs his pirate brethren that, once his commitment to them is over, he will be forced to hunt them down. He’s much less enthusiastic about holding up his promise to marry Ruth, especially after a gaggle of half-sisters, daughters of the highly promiscuous Major-General Stanley (Pierce playing Gilbert playing this most famous role), arrive in the French Quarter. Frederic falls for Mabel (a receding Samantha Williams) and they look forward to happily ever after. But like a riptide, piracy has a way of sucking you back in.

Primarily a satire of British society (like Sir Joseph Porter before him, the Major-General is completely unqualified for his job) and a showcase of Sullivan’s earworm melodies (which still hold up), The Pirates of Penzance was written before the rules of musical theater were codified, before Show Boat and Oklahoma! and the expectation that every song and dance drive the plot forward. This is explicitly why Holmes and his collaborators (director Scott Ellis, choreographer Warren Carlyle, and music director Joseph Joubert) have decided to close Act 1 with the opener from Pinafore, rechristened here “The ‘Sail the Ocean’ Blues.”

It’s the most joyous song of the show, with Monsoon especially shining as she takes up a tambourine to channel Lucille Ball. Eventually, the whole cast joins in playing washboards, a sound that is even more satisfying than a battalion of tap shoes (fabulously fun orchestrations by Joubert and Daryl Waters). It’s a great first act finale, but it doesn’t really achieve its stated goal of leaving us in suspense, a task more easily performed by Monsoon running across stage shouting, “I’ve just remembered something that will throw all our lives into a state of upheaval!”

Conversely, the interpolation of “Alone, and Yet Alive” from The Mikado as a solo for Ruth grinds the story to a halt and seems to be more the work of a zealous agent than a fastidious dramaturg. The creators tell us that they will retrofit this operetta into a new musical, but for large sections of the score, they conspicuously decline.

G&S purists will be relieved to learn that “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” is mostly untouched, spare a few lyrical liberties. Pierce crushes it, rattling off this difficult patter song in a breezy, conversational manner. There are no gasps for breath, and Pierce easily captures the dry wit Gilbert intended. He’s perfect, but it’s hard not to feel like he’s been dropped in from an entirely different production.

This one is hamstrung by such half-choices. David Rockwell has designed a set that feels appropriately analog, with painted backdrops and cutout moving parts, though the generic Gothic cemetery of the second act feels like a missed opportunity. Linda Cho’s costumes are a feast of pattern and color, although I couldn’t make sense of why a British major-general was wearing a blue uniform, beyond the fact that his daughters wore blue too. It all looks handsome under Donald Holder’s brilliant lighting, which allows us to see every move in Carlyle’s choreography, which has plenty of highlights (tap-dancing policemen!) and lowlights (the synchronized hand-holding in “Cat-Like Tread”). That second act showstopper has also been mostly left alone.

It comes as a relief after hearing the songs for which Holmes has decided to rewrite the lyrics, which is where the smarm comes in. “Climbing Over Rocky Mountain” is now “We’re Sashayin’ Through the Old French Quarter,” which doesn’t scan as well and attempts to rebrand the Stanley sisters as suffragists with lyrics like, “Spurned by the fourteenth amendment / Equal rights was its intendment / But we’ve checked the details: not for females!” Their activism is never again mentioned, and you may not even hear what they’re singing about in the first place as the production suffers from intermittent sound balance issues (the sound designer is Mikaal Sulaiman).

It’s cringe-inducing, but not nearly as much as the finale, another import from Pinafore that reimagines the tongue-in-cheek patriotism of “He Is an Englishman” as a celebration of immigration titled “We’re All From Someplace Else,” which makes no sense as nativism is only introduced as a source of conflict in the preceding few lines.

Rather than a slave of duty, Pirates! is the servant of too many masters: Gilbert & Sullivan, Dixieland jazz, milquetoast liberalism, and the tourism lobby New Orleans & Company, which “kindly sponsored” this production. The recipe is for a jambalaya of disparate flavors that come together in delicious harmony. The finished product is operetta as political compromise, in which everyone gets a little taste of what they want, but never enough to be truly satisfied.