Manhattan Season Starts

The Pirates of Penzance is, in Tyrone Guthrie's vigorous resuscitation, always Jolly and often Roger.

Like last season's H.M.S. Pinafore, which he slapped into fresh life, Guthrie's Penzance is less D'Oyly Carte than carte blanche. The policeman's unhappy lot becomes hilarious when the London bobbies scamper on as Keystone cops. Blindfolded by their helmets, billies more or less at the ready, they go through their maneuvers like a ruptured accordion. Moreover, Guthrie has the courage to salvage the unsalvageable. At one point, the major general is the very model of comic relief when he buries a boring ballad by aping a concert singer ineptly palming a prompt card. When the card flutters away like a leaf, he imperturbably unpockets another, finally loses his aplomb in a venomous facial duel with the orchestra.

Operetta may be instant opera, but Gilbert and Sullivan still demands voices. In this predominantly British company, the voices are not only superior, they are clearly intelligible. As Mabel, the perky fiancee of Frederic, the dutiful pirate's apprentice, Marion Studholme pours lyric intensity into Poor Wandering One to make it the evening's high sigh spot. As Major General Stanley, spindle-thin Eric House tackles the greatest polysyllabic scat song of the 19th century and "in matters vegetable, animal, and mineral" he is never tongue-tried. But Frederic, as played by Andrew Downie, is more arch boulevardier than sheltered buccaneer.

Penzance still lacks what it never had, the tart flavor of real social satire, but in Guthrie's version it serves nicely as a gentle spoof of a genteel spoof.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.