Somehow, the sooner the better, David Hyde Pierce should be designated an official National Treasure. My theater buddy and I were mulling what the (extremely positive) feeling Hyde Pierce elicits as soon as he appears on stage in Pirates! The Penzance Musical (Todd Haimes Theatre, booking to July 27) was all about—and not just in this, but in other stage roles such as the Bishop in Stephen Sondheim’s final musical, Here We Are.
There is the former Frasier star’s innate verbal and physical comic timing, dry enunciation and general performing intelligence—first showcased while playing Niles Crane—all encased by a charisma and presence that an audience naturally gravitates to. Hyde Pierce has clearly thought whatever the role is through with care. He instinctively plays less-is-more; even when chaos and activity are erupting around him, the actor pitches his performance at a subtle askew. He also has a kind of solid but playful assuredness. Your eyes immediately go to him.
You know, whatever else happens in the next couple of hours, everything that Hyde Pierce is involved in will not just work, but thrum. His is the least boring, most dynamic and affable version of a safe-pair-of-hands.
This Roundabout Theatre Production of Pirates!, a “reimagining” of the Gilbert and Sullivan’s 1879 comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance, would be agreeable without Hyde Pierce—it also features Ramin Karimloo as a low-key charming Pirate King—but Hyde Pierce’s presence mints the entire enterprise.
Rupert Holmes has rewritten Gilbert and Sullivan’s libretto to set the action not in the eponymous west Cornwall town (where this author went to school!) but in New Orleans, with new orchestrations—with Caribbean and French Quarter influences—by Joseph Joubert (also serving as music director) and Daryl Waters.
Directed by Roundabout’s interim artistic director Scott Ellis, with a great company executing crisp, stage-swirling choreography by Warren Carlyle, the show opens with Hyde Pierce and Preston Truman Boyd, playing Gilbert and Sullivan themselves. They are addressing us as if we were the audience in 1880 at The Theater of the Renaissance in the French Quarter of New Orleans.
Gilbert says he is happier now than on their sortie to New York the year before, where they “discovered to our amazement no less than 15 productions of our London success H.M.S. Pinafore already up and running. Imagine: 15! All unlicensed and paying us no royalty whatsoever!”
“Counterfeit, pirated productions!” says Sullivan, just as self-righteously outraged. “And while some hold that Imitation is the Highest form of Flattery, we maintain that Imitation is the Flattest form of Highway Robbery.”
They confess that the show they are presenting this very evening, The Pirates of Penzance, has already premiered in New York (this is true; Pirates was the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in the United States), but that the atmosphere of New Orleans has been so inspiring that it presented an “opportunity to infuse tonight’s production with the region’s colorful personality,” giving the show’s real, present-day producers the space to adapt and create anew. David Rockwell’s sets and Linda Cho’s costumes have both a colorful lushness and workable simplicity.
“Gilbert”/Hyde Pierce informs us he will play Major-General Stanley; “Sullivan”/Boyd, a surprise character (“And there goes the surprise,” notes Gilbert). A Roundabout benefit concert of the concept was staged in October 2022, featuring Hyde Pierce and Karimloo.
The story remains unchanged: apprentice pirate Frederic (a spry Nicholas Barasch) announces he will soon leave the company of his fellow m’hearties to join the forces of law and order to liquidate them—much to the sadness of Ruth, the maiden of the pirates (two-time Drag Race winner and former Mama Morton, Jinkx Monsoon). As Ruth, who has a long-enduring crush on Frederic, Monsoon nails her character’s woe-streaked solo, “Alone, and Yet Alive,” imported from The Milkado.
The Pirate King—the strapping Karimloo almost bursting from his tight shirt and britches—is a swashbuckler par excellence, but dopily wells up with every mention of orphanhood as he and all his fellows are orphans themselves. Indeed, as Frederic notes, the group and are terrible pirates, because they let their prey go free if they too are orphans.
A group of young women descend, the daughters—from every corner of the world—of Major-General Stanley, who when faced with the angry pirates, to save his own life pretends to be an orphan. Frederic and one of the daughters, Mabel (Samantha Williams) fall in love. The rest of the show is an extended untangling, via heaps of silliness and wordplay—including a self-consciously convoluted plot twist around Frederic’s age, as he was born in a leap year!—to reach a happy ending.
Until Pirates!, “Dear Bill” from Operation Mincemeat was my standout sung performance of the Broadway season; but Hyde Pierce’s rendition of “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” now shares those honors for his standing-still, eyes dead-ahead, surprising-himself, surprising-us navigation through its nutty lyrics: “I know our mythic history, King Arthur’s and Sir Caradoc’s/I answer hard acrostics, I’ve a pretty taste for paradox,/I quote in elegiacs all the crimes of Heliogabalus,/In conics I can floor peculiarities parabolous;/I can tell undoubted Raphaels from Gerard Dows and Zoffanies,/I know the croaking chorus from The Frogs of Aristophanes!…”
It’s sheer joy to watch Hyde Pierce perform this. He doesn’t over-mug or overdo it—quite the opposite—and to watch him dance-trot on point, expressionless, clutching two flags is a suitably absurd cherry on top.
Also excellent: Karimloo leading the company of pirates through their rousing number, “Daughters With Cat-Like Tread,” as they arrive at Stanley’s mansion to do battle. That number, as with so many others, underlines the production’s well-executed merriment.
A final, added song, “We’re All From Someplace Else,” emphasizes not only what links the characters on stage—outsiders, orphan pirates, the globe-spanning, many children of one man—but how a country like America is built on immigration. Its lyrics inevitably echo into the darker politics of our present day, though, in the spirit of the show, with insistent cheeriness.
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