Silly Songs and Smiling Faces

By Gerald Clarke

A new old musical, The Pirates of Penzance, captures Broadway

It is a most improbable hit: a dusty, century-old operetta that nearly everybody has seen--and yawned at--in high school.

But there it is, packing them into Broadway's biggest house night after night and sending them out into the frigid January air with silly smiles on their faces. But then this updated version of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance has something few other musicals can boast of: absolute, unqualified, irresistible fun.

The plot is as lovably ridiculous as it always was. There is the priggish hero whose outlandish sense of duty has tied him to a pirate gang. (His father had sent him off to become a ship's pilot; his nurse, being hard of hearing, mistook "pilot" for "pirate" and apprenticed him to brigands instead.) There is the pretty girl he falls in love with, and her father, "the very model of a modern major general." And there are the cowardly police, led by Tony Azito, and the pirates, so inept and soft-hearted that they will spare anybody who claims to be an orphan. After a time every ship they capture is unaccountably manned only by orphans.

Beneath all that frippery, however, is a work bursting with life, the hearty, beef-and-ale vitality of Victorian England.

"The play has always been done in such a rigid, lifeless way that people don't realize how funny and vigorous the material is on the page," says Director Wilford Leach, one of the prime movers of Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival. "We wanted to do the play rather than people's idea of it. We decided to scrape off the encrustations of tradition but remain faithful to the script."

The production was first put on at Papp's lovely outdoor theater in Central Park last July. To get the freshness he wanted, Leach hired two pop idols for the leads, Linda Ronstadt and Rex Smith. "We weren't out to do a rock version of Gilbert and Sullivan," he explains. "I wanted pop singers to make us rehear the lines." In fact, that seemingly odd casting was a master stroke, and both performers may be duly anointed as perfect in their parts. Ronstadt, 34, looks as innocent as a fawn and is able to hit high notes that her rock fans probably never knew existed. Even she was surprised. "I discovered I had this other voice that I'd forgotten about," she says. "I hadn't used my upper range since I was a child."

Smith, 25, was perhaps more of a gamble. The whole production rests on the ability of the hero to combine two opposites, a sweet but dumb charm and an almost arrogant self-confidence. Smith showed both in audition. "He came in and sang one note--B-flat--over and over," recalls Leach, "and right off he informed us that he could pull it off. He even pulled Errol Flynn's picture out of his wallet.

When I asked him why, he replied, 'Because I intend to swash until I buckle.' Now, anyone who can say something like that in all seriousness can play Frederic, I told Joe. 'But can he sing?' Joe retorted.

'Well,' I said, 'he can hit a B-flat.' We hired him on the spot." Adds Smith:

"There's a lot of me in Frederic. I have been a dupe at times, trying to be an honorable guy."

In almost every production there is someone who is not quite right, off just enough to destroy the illusion of magic that makes an evening in the theater truly memorable for audiences. The Pirates of Penzance is an exception; it is as hard to imagine anyone else playing these parts as it is to imagine another lyricist imitating William Gilbert's jingling lines or another composer confecting Arthur Sul livan's gossamer melodies. Traditionally, for instance, Penzance 's pirate kings have been round and middleaged. Kevin Kline looks more like Smith's guardian angel, Errol Flynn. But his comic king is the kind of fellow who cuts himself every time he unsheathes his sword. Kline, 33, who comes to the role after two previous Broadway hits (On the Twentieth Century and Loose Ends), finds this part the most physically demanding of all.

The Americans in the cast still work hard to master G. &S.'s distinctive patter songs. "I have lazy lips," says Estelle Parsons, 53, who plays the nurse.

"Rock is a whole different thing," adds Smith. "When the lights go out between songs, you take some Gatorade, blow your nose, clear your throat and go on again.

Here the spit you start out with is the spit you end up with." Indeed, the only one who finds it all easy is the only Englishman on the stage, George Rose, 60, that model major general. As a student in London, he practiced diction for at least half an hour each day. "We'd have to repeat certain sentences with a bone propped between our teeth to keep our jaws apart."

The transition from Central Park to the cavernous Uris Theater may have been the greatest difficulty. The acoustics of the house are abominable; sounds that deafen in one spot go unheard in another. For a time the problems seemed in surmountable; but with the help of 72 microphones and 36 loudspeakers most of them have been overcome.

For the past five years, Papp has been using the profits from A Chorus Line, which now amount to about $5 million a year, to subsidize his productions of Shakespeare and the work of young play wrights. For most of those five years he has also been concerned about what will happen when the last chorus is sung. He may now have his answer; The Pirates brought in $318,000 in the preview week before its official opening. "If it takes off, it will take the pressure off the Public The ater for the next six or seven years," Papp exults. That is another way of saying that there is something in The Pirates for everybody. Says Ronstadt, "When I do rock concerts, I never look at the audience. In this I look out all the time. People seem to be delighted. They are smiling for the entire show." --By Gerald Clarke

Reported by Elaine Dutka/New York

With reporting by Elaine Dutka

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