Theatre in Review: Pirates! The Penzance Musical (Roundabout Theatre Company/Todd Haimes Theatre)

	Nicholas Barasch and company. Photo: Joan Marcus

I know I'm saying the obvious, but David Hyde Pierce is the secret weapon of Pirates! Fitted out, alternately, in tails or naval uniform, muttonchop whiskers creeping across his face like Spanish moss, his understated manner reducing each line to a murmur, he artfully nabs one throwaway laugh after another. He appears first as W. S. Gilbert, announcing the evening's conceit, that he and creative partner Arthur Sullivan have decided to reimagine The Pirates of Penzance, as "a bubbling musical jambalaya" set along the streets of New Orleans' French Quarter. He notes -- and this is true -- that the authors, appalled at the many royalty-free knockoffs of H.M.S. Pinafore that proliferated on these shores after its London debut, chose to present Pirates in America first, thus invoking the local copyright laws. "While some hold that Imitation is the highest form of flattery, we maintain that Imitation is the flattest form of highway robbery," he notes, treating that line as if it had been coined by Oscar Wilde.

It's an amusing way of introducing the lark that follows, but Pierce is just getting started. Returning as Major General Stanley, whose cadre of daughters is in peril of being married off to a gang of pirates, he is the soul of British unflappability, harvesting humor from good jokes and vaudeville groaners alike. When the outraged Pirate King snarls, "In the Battle of New Orleans, my father died while you held him captive!" Stanley serenely replies, "Nice that we can laugh about it now." Wandering through a graveyard at night in his sleeping gown, plagued by a guilty conscience, he is a wraith out of an Edward Gorey illustration. Diving into his signature number, "The Very Model of a Modern Major General," he barely moves a muscle while racing through Gilbert's lyrics, a polysyllabic obstacle course designed to leave the faint-hearted gasping for breath. Pierce, however, barely breaks a sweat. It's hard to think of a production the actor hasn't elevated with his peerless wit, and Pirates! wouldn't even be half as amusing without him.

Pierce has expert assistance from Nicholas Barasch as Frederic, the fresh-faced, alarmingly innocent "slave of duty," who, raised by the title characters, is, on the eve of his twenty-first birthday, planning to become a pirate scourge. (Duty dictates it, you see.) More than any other character onstage, Frederic is subject to the contortions of Gilbert's nonsensical plot, so it is no end of help to have an actor who can deadpan his way through lines like these: "Darling Mabel ... I bear most dreadful news. I am a pirate once again and -- owing to an eccentricity in the Gregorian calendar as perfected by His Holiness in 1582 -- we cannot be married for another sixty-seven years! Say that you'll wait for me?" Barasch lends his golden tenor to some of Sullivan's sweetest melodies, most notably the lament, "Oh, Is There Not One Maiden Breast?" He has also perfected the trick of playing this borderline-idiot male ingenue straight while quietly sending him up. In his sly, understated way, he is an accredited graduate of the School of David Hyde Pierce.

Beyond these two, you'll have to take your pleasures where you can find them. As the Pirate King, singing paeans to himself, venturing onto a ship's plank with a sword to menace audience members in the first row, and trying out a few impromptu Charleston steps while dueling with an opponent, Ramin Karimloo is a dashing spoof swashbuckler. But he often seems to be trying too hard, pushing his vocals and leaning hard on laugh lines that don't return the favor; a more relaxed approach might yield more consistent laughs. Ruth, Frederic's put-upon guardian (and, if she has her way, his wife) has been refashioned from the typical Gilbert and Sullivan harridan to fit the campy personality of Jinkx Monsoon; here, she sits astride a piano like Helen Morgan, often spreading her legs in unladylike fashion, a full-fledged torch singer lamenting the infidelity of men. It's a bad fit with the character's mock-innocent tone, and, at full tilt, Monsoon's gravelly voice can be hard to take. A similar attempt has been made to wise up Mabel, Major Stanley's daughter and Frederic's love interest -- her accompanying chorus of sisters now consists of junior suffragists singing about equality -- but, thanks to cuts in the text and score, her character has been reduced to the vanishing point. She and Frederic fall in love so quickly, you might wonder if you have missed a scene. None of this makes Samantha Williams' life easy; one hopes she gets a better role soon.

Full disclosure: I'm not a Gilbert and Sullivan fan -- to my mind, their work suffers from a bad case of the creeping twees -- so I don't mind the prankish approach taken here by adaptor Rupert Holmes. Anyway, there's a long tradition of such things: Quite apart from Wilford Leach's celebrated Pirates of Penzance with Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, Broadway has seen the likes of The Hot Mikado, The Swing Mikado, and Hollywood Pinafore. (I wish someone would revive the latter, which has a libretto by George S. Kaufman. It features a columnist named LouHedda Hopsons, singing, "I'm called Little Butter-Up.") Still, the choice of New Orleans seems awfully random, requiring the importation of melodies from Iolanthe, The Mikado, and Pinafore to suit his design. Some numbers are presented fairly straight up, while others are jazzed up in various styles, including Caribbean and Dixieland. The trouble, however, is that the show can never decide whether it belongs on the Cornish coast or Bourbon Street; in trying to be both, it struggles to find its own identity. The first act, which is mostly spent introducing the characters, is superior to the second-act wrap-up, which grows tedious as various marital roadblocks are removed. It doesn't help that Holmes jettisons the original finale, in which the pirates discover that they are lost aristocrats, thus paving the way down the aisle with Mabel and her sisters. Instead, the show simply grinds to a halt for a number praising the American way of immigration. The tune, "We're All from Someplace Else," is fun, but it hardly works as a closer.

Scott Ellis' staging is swift if occasionally overemphatic, and he gives too much leeway to choreographer Warren Carlyle, whose busy staging ideas often distract from the lyrics; must the entire company wave semaphore flags behind Pierce during his big solo? (Carlyle has some inventive moments, especially the Act I finale with the entire cast playing musical washboards. I also liked the tapdancing chorus of policemen, led by Preston Truman Boyd.) David Rockwell amusingly piles on the scenery, delivering a streetscape dominated by louvers and wrought iron; he also brings an enormous pirate ship into dock and conjures up the grounds of a grand estate, a sinister castle looming in the background. Linda Cho's costumes are a riot of colors and patterns, with the hot colors of Donald Holder's lighting further deepening the show's palette. Mikaal Sulaiman's sound design is not his best; sometimes, the voices are overwhelmed by the lively band conducted by Joseph Joubert.

For at least its first half, a good-natured spirit of fun prevails. Overall, however, Pirates! is a big, fast, colorful entertainment, moving not with catlike tread but in relentlessly high-stepping fashion that ultimately made me feel like a pirate hostage myself. For Pierce's fans, it's probably unmissable, but a clearer vision would make a better, more coherent night out. --David Barbour