Longtime Simpson watchers know that in one episode, Bart asked Sideshow Bob to sing the entire score of the HMS Pinafore in order to delay Bob murdering him.
That episode led me to actually look up some of those songs that I recognized but never knew where they came from. Some of those tunes were readily familiar to me as a watcher of cartoons.
Anyway, it looks like the play HMS Pinafore had a lot of these catchy tunes, but it’s apparently a really really old play. Am I out of luck that I wasn’t born earlier to watch it on stage? Do they revive these old classics from time to time? I live in Los Angeles so if there’s ever an American tour, I stand a good chance of it playing around here.
Technically, H.M.S. Pinafore is a comic opera, and not a play. Like many of the operas written by Gilbert and Sullivan, it’s still regularly performed, especially by amateur groups. However, I’m not sure how you’d find a production near where you live.
If you can make it to Rockville, MD on June 4, the Victorian Lyric Opera Company is performing it. In previous years, I’ve seen it performed by the Ohio Light Opera. If you live in LA, there’s probably an opera/light opera company near you that does it now and then.
Opera A La Carte is more or less local to you. Unfortunately, it doesn’t look like they’re staging Pinafore in any immediate timeframe. I’d keep an eye on that site, though.
There was a company in San Jose (CA) that specialized in G&S productions…alas, they appear to have gone out of business a few years ago.
I once posted “wafted one moment into the blazing day by mocking hope…plunged the next into the Cimmerian darkness of tangible despair…I am but a living ganglion of irreconcilable antagonisms” as my Facebook status.
We performed Pinafore as the annual musical in my junior high when I was in 7th grade. I played Cousin Hebe, and my best friend was Buttercup. We brought the house down.
The biggest problem with many modern productions of G&S operettas is the idiot directors who think that they, being auteurs and all, have a better grasp of the language and rhymes and general humor than W.S. Gilbert. So they think it’s “cute” to update stuff–patter songs especially. Every local production of The Mikado has the idiot director deciding to update the “Little List” song with current “hep” references to stuff like the Gulf Oil Spill or something.
In H.M.S Pinafore, the song that would likely be butchered is “When I Was A Lad”
*To be fair, there are two lyrics in that song that it’s probably ok to update: “the nigger serenader and the others of his race” was meant to refer to banjo performers in blackface and didn’t (in the 1880s) have anything like the same connotation it does now. It’s usually updated to “the banjo serenader and the others of his race” which doesn’t make a lot sense but won’t cause race riots.
The other line that’s changed is “People who chew peppermint and puff it in your face” gets changed to “People who smoke cigarettes and puff it in your face” which honestly makes more sense.
There was a regular craze for Gilbert and Sullivan some 20 years ago and Mr. S and I saw three different stage versions of Pirates of Penzance. G&S was SO popular that they also put on The Mikado and HMS Pinafore around the same time (which we also saw - awesome!). (on the stage proscenium (?) there was a large engraving of a bearded gent, and though I never saw it before, the name Rutherford B. Hayes, president of the US, sprang into my mind. I was shocked when I found out that it WAS RBH.) Wish Gilbert and Sullivan came back into fashion, very entertaining.
I was in a HMS Pinafore production in high school, 20+ years ago, as it happens. I played the sole Marine in the ship’s company and had a red uniform. Very sharp.
The Ohio Light Opera, in Wooster, Ohio, works its way through the G&S repertoire every few years. They did Pinafore just last year, and in 2006: http://www.ohiolightopera.org/
There are two companies in the Chicago area that I know of, but each only produces one show a year. The further east you go in the US, the more G&S you’ll find.
Aaron Sorkin is a big fan and has included references many times in his shows. I wish he’d get behind releasing the film The Pirates of Penzance. I know it is available on Hulu, but that is a miserable way to watch a movie. I want a DVD!
It is certainly true that unnecessary rewrites and topical humor can detract from the quality of a production.
That being said, there are plenty of arguments in favor of the practice itself.
W.S. Gilbert’s lyrics are already filled with “local humor”. Contemporary Victorian audiences no doubt roared their collective ribs out when the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe sang a plea to Captain Shaw (the real-life Superintendent of the Metropolitan Fire Brigade, who was in attendance at the opera’s premiere in 1882), entreating him to deluge her with cold water in order to cool her burning passion for Private Willis. Invoking Captain Shaw’s name 128 years later and thousands of miles removed from London’s soggy streets may bring a twinkle to the eye of purists, but the joke has become fossilized. The whole point of the joke was to surprise the audience with a local reference. Inserting the name of one’s local fire chief (so long as it scans) may seem like “dumbing down” the material, but it is true to Mr. Gilbert’s original intent.
The key, of course, is knowing when to say “when.”
:eek: You know, I would have sworn this was a joke post but I know you wouldn’t do that to us.
Wow, it just goes to show how one person’s fundamental element of universal cultural background is another person’s alien subculture: I wouldn’t have expected that anyone with a college education in the US today would be completely unaware of the continuing existence of Gilbert & Sullivan troupes.
(And no, that’s not a snide snark of intellectual snobbery there: I don’t mean that I think that knowing about G&S is an essential part of higher education. What I mean is just that so many American higher education institutions and the cities where they’re located have theater groups that do G&S, it seems very surprising that someone could go through an American college and never hear about any of them.)
It may make “more sense”, but peppermint is a fresh, funny word as a lyric, while cigarette is a decidedly ugly, awkward one.