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Theater review
PIRATES! THE PENZANCE MUSICAL
The title of “Pirates! The Penzance Musical” is a loony one. What, exactly, is a Penzance musical?
Don’t give this sugar-coated, smile-a-second Broadway show the hook so fast, though. The only grunted “arrrgh”s come from the stage.
The slaphappy, reworked revival of “The Pirates of Penzance,” which opened Thursday night at the Todd Haimes Theatre, has nothing to do with the coast of England. It shifts the absurd action some 2,800 nautical miles west to New Orleans, Louisiana.
Leaving “Penzance” on the marquee, I suppose, serves to remind audiences they’re not seeing “Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides — The Musical” or “Captain Phillips Live!”. They’re getting the same favorite old Gilbert and Sullivan songs, just with a French Quarter twist.
The continental leap dusts off the 145-year-old operetta and gives it an energetic oomph of swing and ragtime music, and the stage is brightened up by hot-sauce pops of purple, yellow and fiery red.
Director Scott Ellis’ boisterous romp is not groundbreaking in the way the Joseph Papp-produced 1980 revival was, but it has the same irreverent spirit — and perpetually ridiculous tale.
There’s naive pirate apprentice Frederic (Nicholas Barasch), who turns 21 (or so he thinks), only to learn that his lifetime of slavish duty to the seafaring rogues was the result of an administrative error.
Years earlier, weird Ruth (Jinkx Monsoon), the only woman he’s ever met, accidentally mistook Fred’s dad saying “pilot” for “pirate.” Whoops.
His cronies, and later enemies, are the ship full of clumsy adult “orphans,” led by the swaggering Pirate King (Ramin Karimloo). Loud and easily fooled, they are far from the world’s best swashbucklers.
And the pinky-out Major General (David Hyde Pierce) and his young daughters — including Mabel (Samantha Williams) — have Fredric’s eyes bulging out of his head, and wedding bells clanging in his ears.
The plot, however, is beside the point, which is why this material can stand up to pretty much any staging so long as the performers can sing the hell out of it and sell a punchline.
All of them can. Especially wonderful is Hyde Pierce’s doddering “I am the very model of a modern” Major General. He’s Niles Crane if he retired to the Villages in Florida. His signature tune, the show’s most famous, is wisely untouched by the creative team. And it kills.
Not so uppercrust — crusty maybe — is “RuPaul’s Drag Race” star Monsoon’s lovesick Ruth. She chews the scenery in just the way you want her to. Monsoon’s “When Fredrick Was A Little Lad” performed on a spinning piano is Lucy and Ethel at the chocolate factory.
Barasch, who’s so often played the quirky sidekick, has become a winning romantic lead. His Frederic is innocent and lovable, and importantly not an airhead. And Karimloo, while not the funniest King ever, looks the part swinging from a rope and booms the tunes like canon fire.
And now, some quibbles quaint.
I’m no purist, but there are a couple changes from Ellis and adapter Rupert Holmes that don’t sail as well as others.
Many lyrics have been updated, which is fine. Not so digestible is that they’ve crammed in a treasure chest of unnecessary backstory to Karimloo’s otherwise rousing “I Am The Pirate King!” that makes it overcomplicated and hard to follow.
And the duo have also tacked on two songs from Gilbert and Sullivan’s “HMS Pinafore.” One of those, “We Sail the Ocean Blue,” at the end of the first act is a brilliant addition that sends the audience into intermission on a high.
The other, the out-of-nowhere finale, misguidedly turns “For He Is An Englishman” into the heavy-handed “We’re All From Someplace Else.”
Searching for an important message in “The Pirates of Penzance” is like trying to find the lost city of Atlantis. Never gonna happen. Just have a wedding and dance a dance.
But what’s two minutes in a musical that’s otherwise effervescent, gorgeously sung, hysterical and frivolous?
These days on Broadway, that is, that is a glorious thing.
English (US)