Dear Messrs. W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan (deceased) --
We are writing to inform you that we here in Ashland are producing your seminal operetta "The Pirates of Penzance" for our 2011 Season. Since you are dead, we have deemed it appropriate to freely adapt your work and add new verses, a song from one of your other works, and snippets of popular music from the 120 years since the piece was first performed. We wanted to let you know that it is a huge hit with our audiences and is playing to sold out houses every night.
We hope this letter finds you well.
Yours sincerely,
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival
P.S. This reviewer loved it!
That's right, I said I loved it! It was a stupendously fun evening. Yes, the tempos were too slow in spots and too fast in others ... Yes, the voices weren't legit (except for Mabel) ... Yes, they added dialogue, made cuts, reworked the ending, and quoted every musical style from "Porgy & Bess" to The Beatles to Public Enemy. But I adored every minute of it.
Why, you may ask, would a Gilbert & Sullivan traditionalist take this position? Because it was sharp, witty, and savvy -- that's why. And it's the norm here. The festival freely adapts plays from the Bard to Moliere all the time. Dramatic cuts and reimaginings are par for the course.
And to be fair, the voices were fine. I was led to believe by a Lamplighter board colleague of mine who saw the show earlier this summer that the actress playing Ruth (Robin Goodrin Nordli) was a disaster. She was perfectly fine. She was no Jean Ziaja or Katy Daniel, but she sang in tune and acted the heck out of the role, giving it a Scottish lilt.
Mabel (opera singer Khori Dastoor) was a lovely actress with a highly trained coloratura. Frederic (Eddie Lopez, who was wonderful in last season's "She Loves Me") had a fine Broadway tenor voice and a fine comic sensibility. The Pirate King (Michael Elich) showed off a muscular Broadway baritone and a dashing physicality. And Major General Stanley (David Kelly) was nimble and droll, especially in the tricky orphan/often dialogue sequence. His patter was perfectly acceptable.
So what's all the fuss about?
Well, they took liberties ... substantial liberties ... HUGE liberties! An added song from "Ruddigore"; a longer pirate/cop fight scene; a gospel "Hail Poetry"; an interpolated line from The Beatles' "When I'm 64" in "Ah, leave me not to pine"; a cop rap.
And you know what? In the end, it's all OK. Because the show rocked! The audience treated it like an Elton John concert. I hadn't heard this level of sustained applause in this theater before, and I've been coming here a long time.
And the technical touches were divine. During the (abbreviated) overture, a team of puppeteers entered the theater with paper seagulls attached to long poles. The gulls wheeled above the audience in graceful circles. Later on, puppet dolphins cavorted across the stage. During "Climbing Over Rocky Mountain," these same tuxedo-clad players assisted the small but potent ladies ensemble by moving individual rocks into position for them to clamber over. Ruth and Frederic's duet was performed in a moving rowboat, piloted by the puppeteer crew. This was inventive and unique stuff ... and very entertaining.
The knock against Ashland's musical forays in the past have been that the voices aren't that trained. But the direction has always been flawless. They seem to have ameliorated the vocal talent issue. There were no glaringly bad voices here.
And voice quality aside, to my mind this was actually a shot in the arm for companies like my own dear Lamplighters Music Theater that specialize in G&S. For the traditional aspects of this show were not always wittier or more clever than our attempts at the material. In point of fact, ours were funnier. It was in the non-traditional arena where the wizards at OSF shone brighter than we poor mortals. I take heart in that.
So, think of it as a big Gala and move on!
Yours sincerely,
A fan
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