Who says opera and operetta can’t be fun? The Glimmerglass Festival in Cooperstown, NY, opened its 2024 season with two lighthearted productions, Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (1879) and Francesco Cavalli’s La Calisto (1651), both featuring inventive staging, magnificent voices, and lots of frivolity.
Pirates has been a perennial favorite not only of G&S aficionados, but of general audiences, as well, thanks to a smashing Broadway revival in 1981 starring Linda Ronstadt, Kevin Kline, George Rose, Rex Smith, and Estelle Parsons which ran 787 performances and was filmed with the original cast (save for Angela Lansbury replacing Parsons). Roundabout Theater Company will present a revival in spring 2025, marking the 27th Broadway staging. If the Roundabout version is anywhere nearly as delightful as director-choreographer Sean Curran’s edition (originally presented by Opera Theater of Saint Louis), New York City audiences are in for a rare treat.
Curran takes the right bemused, whimsical approach to the material which, as most G&S works do, satirizes 19th century melodrama and British class distinctions. Conductor Joseph Colaneri and the Glimmerglass orchestra produce a lush and warm interpretation of Sullivan’s classic music and the cast ably delivers Gilbert’s intricate lyrics. Only a few times in the second act did I have to consult the supertitles above the stage.
Troy Cook is a rapid-fire wonder, rattling off the tongue-twisting patter song for Major-General Stanley and creating a cunning caricature of English authority. Craig Irvin punctures the Pirate King’s pomposity with a thrilling baritone. Eve Gigliotti is a marvelously conniving Ruth, the pirate maid scheming for, but being thwarted in her search for love. Christian Mark Gibbs and Elizabeth Sutphen are hilariously saccharine as the young lovers Frederic and Mabel, displaying rich vocals and investing the roles with parodistic humor. Too often, these roles are overshadowed by the more comic supporting players, but these two are on a par with the entire company.
The chorus of pirates is closer to the Lost Boys of Peter Pan than the stereotypical cutthroats associated with seafaring swashbucklers. (One chorister even wears glasses and a top hat, and carries a teddy bear, reminiscent of Wendy’s brothers.) The policemen of the second act, led by a comically quivering Joshua Thomas as the Sergeant, move like mechanized penguins, and the young ladies are a wonderfully individualized group of flighty debutantes, all ably coordinated by chorus director Katharine Kozak. James Schuette’s outlandish sets and costumes are appropriately cartoonish.
In a brilliant stroke, Curran interjects a deadpan Queen Victoria (a comically stone faced Mary-Jo Merk) to deliver the denouement for a rousing finale to this perfect Pirates.
