'Pirates' in the Park

...as Alice Playten's Edith and Marcie Shaw's Kate do...

...all Gilbert's characters are cynics, psychotics, or honest hypocrites...

...Anyone may shudder when a Victorian maiden in darkest Cornwall opens her mouth to sing in the accents of lower-class Broadway (a ward in chancery to boot...

...Making rock n' rollers Rex Smith and Linda Ronstadt the leads proved a clever move...

...in Leach's version, the ladies are turned upside down so their petticoats can be investigated, and there seem to be two or three pirates contemplating matrimony with each sister...

...This effect already was dying out in Sullivan's day, and he had great fun with it, including a dig at plain chant in the chapel scene...

...It focused Savoyard resentment away from the orchestra and the frenetic staging...

...Just how much leeway that still allows was demonstrated at the Dela-corte, but the clash of styles in this Pirates is usually humorous...

...Kevin Kline is the man of the hour...

...For a hundred years the lovers of the works of Gilbert and Sullivan have sat tight-lipped before stages in every corner of the English-speaking world, reciting the sacred texts verbatim, ready to rise in ire at a missed syllable, a heretical staging, or, worst of all, an omitted song...

...Phrases drawn out with a low-down moan gain a dimension of sadness that is of a piece with Gilbert's steel trap of nonsense...

...Attempts have often been made to update the Savoy operas...

...Yet he would not have been more comfortable in an age of open license than he was in a time of covert vice...

...If done with sincerity, Frederick is comprehensible as a psychotic idealist...

...Moreover, unlike his librettos for Sullivan, they do not contain a line of decent poetry...

...Tony Azito's Sergeant of Police is a reedy tenor, not what the music calls for, but his Elastic Man performance is eye- if not earcatching, ably seconded by a chorus of cops out of Pilobolus by Mack Sen-nett...

...Next summer: a blues Messiah...

...Odder still, the hordes come to hear pop idols liked it too, despite the fact that there were few concesssions to Ronstadt's special status...

...A favorite device of Gilbert's was to oblige his characters to live up to their pretensions-republicans are offered a throne, soldiers a battle, and so on...

...G&S is for actors who can sing and always has been, not the other way around...

...he mimes, sneaking up on the Major-General...

...The staging in Central Park was wild yet respectful, a sincere attempt to have fun while getting every word, every note to the crowd, to make every nonsensical sentiment sincere...

...Probably the latter...

...That it lends itself to any expressive device and can be reinterpreted most elastically and rewardingly is demonstrated by our pop stars...

...The funky vocalism of Smith and Ronstadt does not mix well with Sullivan's chaste lines, and shocks are frequent...

...He is a one-man troupe of prat falling gymnasts...

...It gave us Pooh-Bah, the upper-crust government functionary in The Mikado-I was born sneering"who disciplines his insufferable pride by accepting bribes from anyone, no matter how lowly...

...The serious plays he hoped to be remembered for are rubbish-filled with self-sacrificing lovers, morbid princesses, stalwart peasants...

...Gilbert's bitterness was thus childish rather than Mosaic, as is the bitterness of so many professional cynics...

...Sullivan clothed these words (thus toning down the more bitter ones) in well-crafted, ever-fresh melodies that survive even piano or electric organ arrangement and, worse, steadily declining vocal powers...

...Although there have been "hot"-i.e., jazz-Mikados and a Pir-ates for motorcycle gang and beach bunnies, most directors have resigned themselves to some sort of period piece approach...

...This Pirates is likely to be the first G&S to enjoy an extended run on Broadway in a long time...

...Done with total, straight-faced sincerity it is hilarious, and one can see what set Victorian teeth on edge...

...Her problem is that she has no stage experience, her movements are less ardent than a housewife's in a bargain basement-and how it shows on a stage full of real actors...

...In The Mountebanks (set by Alfred Celler when Sullivan rejected it as ridiculous) a town full of phonies take a magic potion that turns them into whatever they're pretending to bea young girl into a crone, bandits into monks, a flirt into a girl dying of love...

...She says her lines, only two thank heaven, as though she's forgotten them and is ad-libbing bad bogus Gilbert-and she isn't...

...This is testimony to the amazing durability of G&S, that misalliance, for money-making purposes only, of a satirist with a bent for sentimental blank verse dramas and a composer who not only rejoiced in being called the English Mendelssohn but wrote high-minded oratorios to prove it...

...But the tunes still sparkle and the wit still makes us laugh as it strikes an ever-present nerve: The key to Gilbert's humor was a hatred of hypocrisy bordering on hysterical rage...

...In a tender duet, Ronstadt never once looks at her lover-she peers around the audience, as though she were in a nightclub, not a play...

...Today the forms parodied by Gilbert and Sullivan have faded from popular view, and Gilbert's satire seems prettty mild stuff...

...And since Ron-stadt's fans waited day after day, for performance after performance at the 1,200-odd-seat Delacorte Theater, the outraged G&S loyalists could barely squeeze in, much less mob the proceedings...

...One way out, used ere now and followed by Leach, is to substitute the synonymous "rode a horse" in the encore), but the works resist extensive rewrite...

...His Major-General, too fussily delighted with himself to need to exaggerate, is perfect, and so is every syllable of his famous patter song...

...Gilbert got through by being genuinely cleverclever about human foibles in a style that continues to appeal, and clever enough with words to dazzle the ages...

...Rock n' roll and recitative were made for each other...

...Wilford Leach has tossed in every trick of the farceur's trade and Graciela Daniele has choreographed to the hilt of a cutlass...

...His baby face and yearning sincerity are exactly right for the sentiments he is obliged to profess, slavery to duty and all that...

...Consequently, like Jack Point's fans in Yeoman of the Guard, we don't blame him-so long as he's funny...

...This sort of double entendre update, an absurdity raised a power or two, anything for a laugh so long as the textual proprieties are observed, seem fair...

...Although Shaw liked it, no one has revived it lately...

...Now who put that there...

...Her singing is wrong but all right, decent amateur coloratura, good pitch-and Sullivan's intervals are not easy or predictable...

...Even the devoted must have many a reference explained ("Sat a gee," the Major-General's rhyme for "strategy" in Act 1 of Pirates, always causes trouble...

...The ingenues, however, are the reason so many young New Yorkers were willing to stand in line all day for tickets (including not a few, I'll be bound, who had never seen an operetta before and can't wait for future seasons with Jerry Garcia's Lord Chancellor in lolanthe and Donna Summer's Katisha in The Mikado...

...But oh...

...It has also been filmed for eventual telecast, but no date has been set-impresario Joseph Papp fearing, perhaps, to steal the thunder of a possible hit, as a telecast of Much Ado About Nothing was felt to have done...

...For the curious, the descent is well documented on disc...

...Interestingly, the age of Victoria was a busy, literate time, with thousands of plays, hundreds of playwrights and dozens of theaters, yet G&S and The Importance of Being Earnest are all that endure...

...Confronted with all this, George Rose wisely opts for as different an approach as possible...

...Many of the Savoy operas drift around town every year or two, and the most popular are performed almost constantly throughout the English-speaking world...

...Smith's lasciviousness, out of place in the Mozartean "Is There Not One Maiden Breast," breathes life into the somber phrases of his duet with Mabel, and his bluesy riffing on "O joy un-bounded/O rapture unexampled" did make sense of a moment most Frederics find embarrassing...

...Some of the casual charm of the outdoor production may fade indoors, especially with a $30 top...

...Ronstadt's mealy, rushed way with spoken lines is tamed by having to give words note values, and the espressiveness she brings to rock, which she must and does mute for Mabel's cool waltz aria, finds an outlet here...

...Oddly enough, though, most of the faithful who did get in rather enjoyed the production...

...But it had the overwhelming advantage of his wit, enhanced by Sullivan's ageless melodies...

...No one has Gilbert's light touch, and a modern style skews the precise clockwork of the dramas...

...His voice is the most solid Savoyard in the cast, his portrayal zany but to its own self true...

...Pearl releases remastered sets of the 1920's D'Oyly Carte recordings, and they're grand...

...It certainly had the Park audience in stitches...

...The piece is hardly forgotten, though...

...The Park performers are on the whole very fine...

...In Engaged, Gilbert's most acid comedy, and one that does hit the boards now and then, all the characters mouth sentimental cliches while grasping openly for money-I knew that the unselfish creature loved you for your wealth alone," that sort of thing...

...Ronstadt, the major draw of the production, is also the sore thumb...

...Yet Gilbert did not, in fact, despise the sentimental conventions...

...His Pirate King achieves the impossible, more athleticism than his Tony Award-winning role in On The Twentieth Century...

...Where other actors are content to mug with brows and eyes and mouth, Kline, whose face is as plastic as some sensuous synthetic fiber, also mugs with his feet, his knees, his chest, several swords, the conductor's baton, a small trampoline, and the orchestra pit...

...The result should continue to delight all except the most masochistic kill-joy...

...Modern audiences, if unfamiliar with opera, don't know what to make of recitative-indeed, opera lovers simply endure it, because singers nowadays rarely seem to know what can be done to bring the form to life as enhanced speech...

...Gilbert saw the betrayal of Victorian ideals by Victorian actions and was disgusted...

...how funk serves recitative...

...Still, she looks passably Victorian and demure...

...Gilbert and Sullivan did not always mean the former when they mentioned the latter, a distinction meaningless today...

...Turn to the "Martyn Green" set of D'Oyly Cartes, currently on the Richmond label, and the singing is still okay, but a decided blandness has crept in-except for Green himself, of course...

...What he wanted was a world in which the preposterous Victorian sentimentality was sincere, its tenets sacred to all...

...And he knows how to utter such lines, how to move on stage, and even how to pronounce clearly all the words of the "Matter" trio, interpolated from Ruddigore...

...Now the New York Shakespeare Festival, renowned for manhandling (and, occasionally, exalting) the Bard in Central Park since 1956, was not only taking them on, it was throwing down quite a gauntlet: rock n' roll stars in The Pirates ofPenzance, the usual eccentricities of staging, and (oh horror...

...It never occured to him how dull that would be...

...Rondstadt, in contrast is pathetic-in the 20th, not the 19th, century sense...

...She gets some strange effects by jumping from her natural low register to a "Blue Bayou" soprano in which she cannot pronounce words clearly...

...In swearing, "However plain you be I'll love you," to the girls' chorus, Frederic should not imply 20 one-night standswhat he means is a lifetime commitment, monogamous at that...

...the orchestra reduced to half a dozen winds and brass, keyboards, and assorted amplified percussion...

...Smith's only fault-and it did cause some shudders-is the rocker's ingrained habit of thinking of "sex" whenever he sings the word "love...

...Patricia Routledge is a more genteel Ruth than is the custom, cleaning Frederic's ears between stanzas and carrying her luggage about on the off-chance of an elopement...

...Rex Smith's Frederic is rather good...

...On the other hand, it adds to the fun to have the pirates not merely seize the girls and sing of marriage (which killed 'em in Victoria's day...

...Then try the series released on London since the late '60s and either the singers no longer have voices or they are no longer so well-trained...

...Pirates is headed for Broadway to restore the fortunes of the Festival, ebbing lately with the declining popularity of A Chorus Line...

...A minor point...

...They have had to suffer a lot, but they have made producers and performers quake in turn...

...It is more important to look, move and speak well, and Smith is fine...

...nonetheless, this is quite a production and it would be a pity to let it vanish...

...If Frederic is shown to feel lust, we lose our faith...