Pirates of the Mississippi

David Hyde Pierce and the cast of Pirates! The Penzance Musical. (Photo: Joan Marcus.)

At sixty-six, David Hyde Pierce is so slender and light of foot that he can slip on and off a stage like a wraith. As Major-General Stanley in Pirates!: The Penzance Musical, Roundabout Theatre’s reimagined version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, nearing the finish of its Broadway run, Hyde Pierce always appears ungrounded, off-balance, but you don’t worry that he might fall over; he seems far more likely to float away. He plays the character, written for the popular D’Oyly Carte comedian George Grossmith – whose 1879 performance parodied the mannerisms of the well-known Sir Garnet Wolseley – as a sly boots hiding behind the façade of a dotard, and he’s so funny that you continue to giggle over him after he’s vanished. He’s like a master vaudevillian who can hold an audience in the palm of his hand with the smallest shift in intonation or the subtlest double take.

Pirates! has been retooled by Rupert Holmes to give it an American setting, New Orleans in the Victorian Age instead of England. It’s not the first Pirates of Penzance to be Americanized: in Joseph Papp’s 1981 Broadway incarnation (Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt were in the cast), musical-comedy conventions were substituted for the English operetta conventions G&S burlesqued. Papp’s Pirates was both televised and made into a feature film; the stage version was far superior to the movie, which mostly came to life when Kline, playing the Pirate King, was on camera. For Pirates!, Holmes has altered the tempos of Sullivan’s music as part of his agenda to make it sound Caribbean, which is fun but doesn’t add much of interest to the musical. His concept is that Gilbert and Sullivan, having discovered that a number of U.S. companies are mounting unlicensed productions of H.M.S. Pinafore, have decided to bring their own Yankee-inflected rewrite of The Pirates of Penzance to America, starring Gilbert himself as the modern Major-General. (Sullivan, played by Preston Truman Boyd, also makes a stage appearance, in the role of the Sergeant of Police.) The premise doesn’t make much sense, and it seems like an awfully complicated way to justify the change in setting, but the operetta plot, like all of the plots of G&S shows, is so silly – it’s nothing but embellishments – that you can do just about anything to it with impunity. (Just about: a couple of summers ago I saw a truly baffling Mikado in London set at a Boy Scout camp.)

The staging by Scott Ellis, the Roundabout’s interim artistic director, is sometimes enjoyable and sometimes wearying. And it tends to wind down in the second act, like the plot apparatus itself: the juvenile hero, Frederic (Nicholas Barasch), is about to be released from his indenture to the Pirate King on his twenty-first birthday and join the right side of the law, when it’s discovered that, because he was born on February 29th in a leap year, he owes his master decades more of service. (It’s like the characters’ efforts to avoid execution for flirting in The Mikado, but not as clever.) The choreographer, Warren Carlyle, has conceived some nifty numbers that showcase the skills of the dancers – especially the men, who double as pirates and policemen. The first-act finale, an interpolation from Pinafore (“We Sail the Ocean Blue,” here retitled “The ‘Sail the Ocean’ Blues”), which is performed by the entire cast accompanying themselves on washboards, looked tiresome on the Tony Award show but turns out to be one of the highlights. And Holmes has rewritten the famous “For he is an Englishman” chorus from Pinafore as “We’re All from Someplace Else” to comment on Trump’s immigration policy.

Aside from the formidable Hyde Pierce, Ramin Kamirloo, who played Nicky Arnstein in the Broadway revival of Funny Girl, gives the liveliest performance as the Pirate King – presented here, as it was by Kline in the Papp Pirates of Penzance, as a charismatic, swashbuckling scamp. Runner-up is Boyd’s second-act appearance as the Sergeant of Police. I could have done with much less of Jinxx Monsoon’s monotonous, over-the-top turn as Ruth, Frederic’s one-time nanny, who became a “piratical maid of all work” when they got mixed up the pirate crew and has been cherishing the hope that he will marry her after he wins his freedom. (Her employers tasked her with apprenticing the boy to a pilot; suffering from bad hearing, she thought they said “pirate.”) At the other end of the spectrum, Samantha Williams, as Stanley’s eldest daughter, whom Frederic falls for, has a sweet voice and not much personality.

Except for Linda Cho’s disappointingly workaday costumes, Pirates! is lush, the set by David Rockwell and the lighting by Donald Holder combining to create an exotic palette rich in pinks and purples. One of the pleasures of the 2024-25 Broadway season has been the visuals in many of the musical offerings. Pirates! joins Just in Time, Death Becomes Her, Maybe Happy Ending, Floyd Collins, Swept Away, Buena Vista Social Club, A Wonderful World and Dead Outlaw on that distinguished list.

– Steve Vineberg is Distinguished Professor of the Arts and Humanities at College of the Holy Cross in Worcester, Massachusetts, where he teaches theatre and film. He also writes for The Threepenny Review and is the author of three books: Method Actors: Three Generations of an American Acting Style; No Surprises, Please: Movies in the Reagan Decade; and High Comedy in American Movies.