A Victorian Big-Budget Spectacular

The Pirates of Penzance

Directed by Nicholas I. Martin

At the Agassiz tonight and tomorrow

IT WAS THE MOST boring period in all of history: the Victorian Era. A time of chastity, of temperence, and of virtue. Of staid manners and reverence for the Queen. Nothing if not dull.

One good thing that can be said of staid morality, however, is that it is the perfect target for parody--a fact that did not escape the wittier Victorians. Some of the brightest comedy ever written--for example, Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest--was forged during this era of moral gloom.

Unlike Wilde, however, Gilbert and Sullivan managed to make virtue fun. In Pirates of Penzance, the musical team ribbed the notion of the 'true Englishman' without discarding the belief that British ways are, after all, the most decent.

Unarguably, Pirates is strong material for the stage, even in an age as decadent as our own. But great material does not necessarily make for great productions. Gilbert and Sullivan's musically complicated librettos require a talented cast and orchestra--a combination generally in short supply. Happily, Harvard's Gilbert and Sullivan society delivers a lively and professional production, a big-budget spectacle worthy of a Victorian opera.

It is a credit to director Nicholas Martin, who manages to cram it all into the the Agassiz--no mean feat given the size of the company and the dimensions of the stage. But once the entire 26-member cast is up there belting away, it's worth the effort.

The plot is a fast-paced blend of theatrical parody, stock farce, and typical British silliness. Frederick (Lee Eichen), ex-apprentice to a gang of nice-guy pirates, is torn between loyalty to his former masters and his moral duty to turn them in. To complicate matters, he has fallen in love with the daughter (Lisa Zeidenberg) of the local Major General (Andrew Gardner) who is bent on the pirates' destruction. How does Frederick escape from this frightfully sticky wicket? Suffice to say that the resolution is as silly as it is stirring.

As purveyors of this serpentine plot, the cast of Pirates really does have something to sing about. Particularly good are Zeidenberg, who has a voice which sounds like something off a compact disk, and the darkly cherubic David Schrag as the Pirate King.

IN FACT, Pirates exhibits a quality rarely found on the Harvard stage: the lack of a visible weak link in the cast. If there is a flaw, it is that the cast as a whole lacks proper volume to be heard clearly over the orchestra. This is an important point, given the complexity of the lyrics; it is frustrating to have to strain to pick up on the words.

This is especially true of songs which are especially rapid, such as the Major General's song (admirably dispatched nevertheless by Gardner), or particularly soft, such as the duet between Mabel and Frederick (Lee Eichen). But on the whole such moments are rare and really nothing more than slight flaws on an otherwise extremely strong production.

Finally, aside from an exhortation to go see this play, kudos are in order for the entire orchestra, its conductor, Richard Shore, and its excellent triangle player. Now, go see it.