To do that well one has to listen, and read, very closely. The opening number, "Pour, Oh Pour the Pirate Sherry," contains a great example. Sherry is neither ale nor grog. It's an upper-crust beverage traditionally served in a dainty glass. If you understand that, then you understand that Gilbert is tipping us off from the start that this gang of pirates is really a bunch of wealthy guys who've chucked it all to live a life glorious and free on the open ocean. But - and this is Gilbert's real genius - they still have vestiges of their old tastes: it's as if a group of lawyers and bankers formed a biker gang but no matter how bad they think they are, they still like a good pinot noir.

 

When Tyrone Guthrie embarked on his landmark HMS Pinafore at Stratford in 1960, he asked, "Would it be a good thing if the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition could be preserved intact? I think not . . . to preserve the Savoy operas forever in the style of the 1880s would be like embalming a dead body. The flesh, the outward appearance would remain intact, but the breath of life would not thereby be restored." I doubt a truer word about the responsibility of interpreting a classic text has ever been spoken. And I hope we fill the sails of this Pirates with that breath - respectful of tradition but absolutely contemporary at the same time.

 

Initially, set designer Anna Louizos and I were inspired by backstage images from the Victorian era. It intrigued me how little the basic mechanics of theatre-making have changed over the last two hundred years. What is more, most of the original design for rigging and other stage engineering was itself derived from maritime models. As we searched for something that spanned the Victorian while still retaining a contemporary edge, with costume designer Paul Tazewell, we stumbled upon the "Steampunk" movement. I was thrilled to learn more about these retro-futurists in our midst and to incorporate into the design parts of their glorious expression of neo-Victoriana through the lens of Jules Verne. I think an important aspect of Steampunk is its effort to render our increasingly invisible and virtual world into ostensible and visible machines. The more our information, and even our art, consists of bytes floating in a cloud, the more we desire to literalize the wires and gears. But ultimately, the movement's real appeal is that it asserts the endless ability of each person to reinvent him or herself - and that is precisely what every character in Pirates is doing, whether it's the pirates, the police, the plucky girl-adventuresses, or even Ruth and the Major-General.

 

I hope this production will appeal to G&S novices and aficionados alike. I'd like to think that audiences will find this work both entirely familiar and yet fresh at the same time. We've hewed very close to the original script (I have even gone back to some passages that were in the earliest drafts) but we have felt free to invent and explore. I want to retain the great material that G&S left us while invigorating it with a contemporary sensibility - to find novel solutions to some of the traditional conundrums of their brilliant topsy-turvydom.

 

"Wherever we went," recalled performer Martyn Green about one of his world tours, "we were welcomed like members of a close and happy family. 'Gilbert and Sullivan, eh?' a hotel porter said to me. 'Oh yes, they're old buddies of mine. My father's buddies, too - and my children.' " As with the novels of Charles Dickens, the only other product of the era with which they can profitably be compared, they have survived their age because they have transcended it.

 

There were two reasons for the visit of Gilbert, Sullivan and their energetic producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, to New York in the autumn of 1879. The first was the production of an authentic staging of their phenomenal success HMS Pinafore, already playing in a dozen unauthorized theatres in the U.S.A. The second was a masterstroke planned to thwart the American "pirates." The new opera was to have its première in New York, with a token performance to be given in England at the same time to secure copyrights in both countries. The consternation of the partners can only be imagined when it was discovered that Sullivan had somehow left the score of the new opera behind, and the music had to be reconstructed from memory. A plaque at the site of his hotel (45 East 20th Street) commemorates this event.

 

In spite of all the difficulties, The Pirates of Penzance had its world première at New York's Fifth Avenue Theatre on New Year's Eve, 1879. Gilbert and Sullivan had hit their stride. They had established a company of performers working under a management that gave them a degree of control over their productions unheard of at that time. Their names were rapidly becoming household words; Sullivan considered the new show a great improvement over Pinafore.

 

"The libretto," he wrote to his mother, "is ingenious, clever, and wonderfully funny in parts, and beautifully written for music. The music is infinitely superior to Pinafore in every way - 'tunier,' and more developed." Gilbert would have agreed, though he was no judge of music. "I know only two tunes," he once boasted. "One is 'God Save the Queen.' The other isn't."

 

For the next decade they would turn out a rapid succession of comic operas the likes of which the world had never seen before or since - such treasures as Patience, Iolanthe, The Mikado, Ruddigore and The Yeoman of the Guard. In 1881 the Savoy Theatre was built to house these operas. (Even today G&S players are known throughout the world as Savoyards.) This new home caused quite a sensation; it was the first theatre to be lit with electricity, its décor differed radically from those of other theatres, and extra fees for program and coat checking were abolished. Like everything else associated with this partnership, the Savoy was first class.

 

The only trouble on the horizon was Sullivan's nagging doubts about the comic entertainment's trivializing his talents and inhibiting his gifts as a "serious" composer. Though he would compose other music ("Onward Christian Soldiers," for example), it was fortunate for posterity that he lived the life of a playboy. Gambling at Monte Carlo, socializing with royalty and conducting discreet affairs with many women demanded more money than serious music alone could provide.

 

Gilbert, on the other hand, was much more austere than his collaborator - qualities no doubt inherited from a stern father. When little William was two, his parents took him to Naples on holiday, where his simple-minded nurse was prevailed upon by Neapolitan pirates to remove him from his perambulator and hand him over to them. Ransomed for a paltry ₤25 by a predictably furious father, Gilbert reimagined the episode for years: Pirates, Pinafore and The Gondoliers all feature stolen babies and confused nannies.

 

In any event, the two different personalities frequently clashed, most seriously in the infamous "carpet quarrel," a petty argument about who would pay for the cost of a new carpet for the Savoy. The resulting breach was never fully healed.

 

The continuing popularity of the G&S repertoire can be credited to D'Oyly Carte heirs, who produced periodic revivals of the operas and ultimately formed a successful touring company to take the traditional staging around England and the world. The original Savoy stars - George Grossmith, Rutland Barrington and Richard Temple - were replaced by new ones such as Martyn Green and John Reed. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company was synonymous with G&S, and the original staging of the operas had its parallel in the Moscow Art Theatre's privileged relationship with the plays of Chekhov. Those stagings, however, ultimately became ossified, and the company ceased to perform in the mid-1980s, a victim both of Britain's economic woes and its own refusal to explore beyond the bounds of tradition.

 

Gilbert and Sullivan operas have been filmed under various circumstances, both fondly remembered (The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan and Topsy-Turvy) and instantly forgettable (The Pirate Movie); they have been televised (Groucho Marx was an eccentric KoKo in a Bell Telephone Hour Mikado) and rewritten for changing times (The Hot Mikado, Swing Mikado and Black Mikado, among others). In the early 1960s, when the rights lapsed into the public domain, the famous director Tyrone Guthrie made an impact with his decidedly non-traditional staging of HMS Pinafore, which originated in Stratford and played throughout Canada and the U.S. The inventive and beautifully choreographed conceptions by Stratford's Brian Macdonald in the 1980s and '90s set a new standard for imagination and fun, establishing him as one of the world's leading interpreters of G&S. By one contemporary count there are over 250 producing organizations throughout the world dedicated to Gilbert and Sullivan.

 

The popularity of Pirates in North America was given a boost in 1980, when Joseph Papp of the New York Shakespeare Festival convinced Central Park summer audiences that British wit and American showbiz know-how could combine to produce a wonderfully nutty and affectionate appreciation of the comic opera. Radically rethought by director Wilford Leech, one of its most daring risks was the casting of rock stars Linda Ronstadt and Rex Smith as the young lovers.

 

To make the opera more appealing to a Broadway audience, Papp's creative team wrote new orchestrations for a synthesizer-based orchestra. The "fight scene" between the pirates and police (to which Sullivan had allotted only ten chords) was entirely rescored. "Sorry Her Lot" from Pinafore was interpolated (to give Ronstadt another number to sing), as was a slightly rewritten "My Eyes Are Fully Open" from Ruddigore. The pirates' chorus "With Cat-Like Tread" paid homage to Papp's own A Chorus Line.

 

An undistinguished film version of this production, with George Rose and Kevin Kline recreating their roles alongside Ronstadt and Smith, failed to capture the nonsense and energy so evident on the DVD of the Central Park production. While plenty of liberties were taken, this is an affectionate treatment by people who obviously loved the original version, and it reinvigorated the public's mania for Pirates.

 

The vitality of the Savoy operas, a century and an ocean away from their original time and place, suggests an inner strength more potent than we often suspect. Possibly we have reached the time in which, as G.K. Chesterton prophesied, "it will be found that this Victorian nonsense will prove more valuable than all that was considered solid Victorian sense. . . . And it may be that in the remote future that laughter will still be heard, when all the voices of the age are silent."

 

Bob Hetherington is the Chair and Professor of Theatre and Dance at The University of Memphis in Tennessee. He has received two Guthrie Awards for contributions to productions at Stratford, and is a frequent Stratford essayist.

 

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