Rex Smith, Linda Ronstadt, Kevin Kline
(Electra VE-601) |
The late Joseph Papp was best known for the New York Shakespeare Festival,
which he founded, but he was also a G&S lover. In 1980, to commemorate
the centenary of The Pirates of Penzance (which had received
its premiere in New York, the only G&S opera to do so), Papp mounted
a souped-up, modernized version of the opera in Central Park. The show was
a sensation, and Papp transferred it to the Broadway stage, where it ran for
over 800 performances. It won Tony Awards for Best Revival, Best Director
(Wilford Leach) and Best Actor (Kevin Kline). Linda Ronstadt was nominated
for Best Actress in a Musical.
The production toured nationally, had a respectable run in London's West
End, and was made into an unsuccessful movie. (Another film,
The Pirate Movie, had nothing
to do with Papp's production but was clearly inspired
by the mania for Pirates that was then prevalent.)
Papp's Pirates in London
Tim Curry as The Pirate King |
The Papp production was much criticized in G&S circles. To make
the opera more suitable for a Broadway audience, Papp's creative team wrote
new orchestrations for a synthesizer-based orchestra. Musical tags were
expanded or contracted, verses were transposed. The "fight scene" between
the pirates and police (to which Sullivan had allotted only ten chords) was
entirely rewritten. "Sorry her lot" from Pinafore was interpolated
(to give rock star Linda Ronstadt another number to sing), as was a
slightly-rewritten "My eyes are fully open" from Ruddigore.
The Act II finale was restored to its first-night state.
Liberties were taken with the dialogue too, though certainly not to the
same degree as the music.
While the success of the Papp production is impossible to deny, some
conservative G&S fans have asserted that a "traditional" Pirates
could have enjoyed equal or greater success. I find this to be nothing
more than wishful thinking, and there is certainly no historical evidence
to back it up. Other fans say that this is simply not Gilbert and Sullivan,
but an original musical by Joseph Papp loosely based on The
Pirates of Penzance. I don't buy that, either. While there are
plenty of liberties, this is an affectionate treatment by people who obviously
love the opera. By and large, the audience is encouraged to laugh at
Gilbert's humor, and to sing along with Sullivan's
melodies. In this it is quite different from what is often called a "concept"
production, in which the audience is asked to laugh at the director's
jokes, not the author's. While I consider the producers' adaptations to have
been completely necessary for the work to have enjoyed the commercial
success that it did, this is still Gilbert's and Sullivan's opera through and
through. I also believe that, were G&S themselves alive today,
this is the kind of production they would probably be doing.
Bruce Miller expressed similar admiration for what Papp achieved:
I find the Papp Pirates stage production to be highly respectful
of the original. I do not agree with all of the decisions made in that
production, but it remained remarkably faithful to the words and the music
while giving a fresh perspective to the piece.
The musical arrangements, for example, changed some of the timbres so as
to appeal to a rock-oriented public, and I personally would not have gone
that way, but the original orchestral conceptions remained remarkably intact,
and a great deal of reserach into Sullivan's original was done by the arranger.
I am disappointed that so many subsequent productions have mindlessly copied
some of the directorial schtick I am so tired of the Keystone Kops turns
in the second act but in 1982 this was an inspired idea.
Right or wrong, the Papp's Pirates made a large splash in
the early eighties, and many who would ultimately become G&S fans
met their first acquaintance of the Savoy operas with this production.
That the affection many had for Papp's version was transferrable to more
traditional productions suggests, in my mind, that this version was far
more respectful to the spirit (if not the letter) of G&S
than many would care to admit.
DVD of the Central Park production, issued by
Kultur |
The production lives on, as amateur groups still rent Papp's revised libretto
and orchestration, on occasion. The 1981 recording, recently re-issued on CD,
is a successful recreation of what Papp's Pirates was all about, and I
would cheerfully recommend it to all who have an open mind.
The Central Park Production
Although the most recently released, this is the earliest state of the Papp
Production available. It is an archival video of the original production at
the outdoor Delacorte Theater in New York's Central Park. As noted in the cast
list above, some of the performers are not the same as in the recording or the
video, although the only difference in a major role is that of Ruth. This version
is available, as far as I know, only through the
Broadway Theatre Archive. There
is some degredation in the quality of the video, but it is nevertheless emminently
watchable.
Dan Kravetz wrote:
The Broadway Theater Archive, which sells mostly on
the Web, has released a complete performance of the
Joseph Papp production of The Pirates of Penzance,
taped live at the Delacorte Theater in Central Park,
New York City, during the summer of 1980, available on
VHS and in preparation on DVD. This video may have
been taped to be shown on television, but was never
broadcast, except possibly on the short-lived CBS
Cable service over 20 years ago. The 1983 film version
of the same production with essentially the same cast
(of the leads, only Ruth is different, with Angela
Lansbury replacing Patricia Routledge) is ruined by
awkward, unneccesary cuts. The Delacorte video is the
complete opera, in its early stages before many of the
"traditional" silly bits evident in the film were
established. Though it lacks the vivid color
cinematography of the film (but is also in color), it
conveys the spirit of the Papp production much more
effectively the excitement of the audience
discovering Pirates as the splendid romp it is on
a summer evening in New York, is obvious to the viewer
at all times, whereas the film has a more contrived
air about it. We still need a real 1880's-style
Pirates on video as well as on stage (Papp's version
has been copied far too often over the past two
decades), but this important chapter in the history of
G&S is too much fun to ignore one can now understand
better than ever what the fuss was all about.
Rex Smith, Linda Ronstadt and Kevin Kline, in the
familiar posed shot from the New York production. |
The Broadway Theatre Archive includes
these comments from the original director, Wilford Leach:
"We treated Pirates as a new work," says Leach, "as something living
rather than as something to be done correctly," with reverence toward the
dead. We approached the production from the script itself, and
from the music, rather than from the tradition of how it 'ought' to be done."
Along with limbering Pirates' joints, Leach loosened its vocal chords.
"I wanted voices that had kept their individuality. And I like pop singers. That
made Linda Ronstadt a natural. And the Gods were with us, because she had the
voice and had wanted to be in Gilbert and Sullivan ever since sixth
grade, when her older sister sang "Sorry Her Lot" from Pinafore. That's
why we added that song to Act II.
"Frederic's role was the hardest to fill. We auditioned about 800 singers before
someone suggested Rex Smith, whose forthright sincerity, good looks,
personal warmth and musicianship were everything we had been looking for."
As for his partnership with Elliott and Daniele? "It's like dancing with someone
and not knowing who's leading we all knew the same thing at the
same time without saying it."
One minor casting note: Alexandra Korey, who sang Edith on both the recording
and the movie, is listed in the credits of the Central Park production as a "soloist,"
but as another artist is listed as Edith, it is not clear what Korey did. (I did not
notice a split in the role of Edith, as is sometimes done, although I could have
missed it.)
The Recording
After the Central Park production transferred to Broadway and was a smash
hit, the original cast recorded the show (with a different Ruth, but otherwise
the same artists in the major roles). The recording includes the dialogue and
is the most familiar version of the production. Careful listeners will detect
a few changes from the Central Park version, as the performers evidently (and
understandably) had evolved in their roles.
Kevin Kline leads the pirates onstage for their first
entrance, from the original production. |
The Movie
It is remarkable that a production that achieved such notable success on
Broadway utterly flopped as a movie. To begin with, the producers
seriously misjudged the audience, scheduling the première as a
pay-per-view television event that fell entirely flat with American audiences.
The film was then launched in commercial theaters (without a prescreening
for reviewers a clear sign that the studio knew they had a
failure on their hands). Its run was mercifully short.
The movie fails for a variety of reasons. The scenery is kitschy and cartoonish.
The camera work is amateurish and constantly calls attention to itself. The
characters' reactions are about twice too big, as if no one has told them that
they're on a big screen and don't need to play to a Broadway theater balcony.
At the end of the film (where the fight scene between the pirates and police
would be), there is an over-long, irrelevant and completely unnecessary
interpolated scene involving a romp through the town of Penzance and
the invasion of a theatre in which an amateur production of Pinafore
is playing. Overall, it is as if the creative team (the same folks that
were responsible for the stage production) completely forgot the magic
that made Papp's Pirates a success on Broadway to begin with.
Dan Kravetz embellished on the movie's problems:
There are really two issues involved. First, the Pirates film was not as
good an adaptation of the Papp stage production as it could have been. The
cuts were awkward and unnecessary Pirates done complete (even with
the two added songs from other G&S operas) would not have been an unusually long
movie. The entire affair looked cheap what came off as engagingly silly on
stage seemed embarrassingly silly on film, because standard film production
values were ignored. Fans of the Broadway show did not have much to cheer
about when the film was released, except the oppotunity to see the Broadway
stars' performances preserved. Many things that were done in the film were
actually handled better cinematically in that other notorious film,
The Pirate Movie.
Seeing the policemen marching through the countryside in the
latter film was much more impressive than anything in film of Pirates.
Finally, the Papp stage show was geared to having an involved, live audience
present to laugh, applaud or even sit quietly transfixed at different times
during the show. All G&S operas work best in front of a live audience. When
the same performers play the same production to cameras, it just doesn't
work as well.
The second issue is how the Pirates film failed to engage audiences in
general. For one thing, Pirates was not yet a "classic Broadway show" when
the film came out in 1983. Thanks to Papp, it was on its way to that status,
but it probably would have helped to wait a few years before releasing the
film. Linda Rostadt and Rex Smith were no longer superstars of the type that
would make pop music fans jam the theaters for chance to see them, and the
new "experimental" work they were doing outside standard pop music did not
necessarily cause their fans to follow them to the theater or the cinema.
Film musicals had already been a dead art form for several years, no matter
what legendary singers (including Streisand and Elvis) could be persuaded to
appear in them. The music video was in its infancy and pop music fans were
about to begin a new way of enjoying their idols on screen that had nothing
to do with the old conventions of the feature film. There was also the
deadly "G" rating. The Pirate Movie, as I recall, got a more attractive PG
rating by changing the pirates' "Oh, dash it all!" to something stronger and
by letting a pirate's spyglass experience a spontaneous change of length
when he first sees the maidens through it.
So there are many reasons why the Pirates film did not succeed with theater
buffs or film buffs, but it is extremely valuable as it lets us see Kevin
Kline and George Rose performing at the peak of their careers.
[Note: Dan Kravetz wrote his review of the film before the original Central
Park production was released on video. Now that that has happened, the importance
of the film (as preserving the Papp production, even if in a flawed way), is
significantly undermined.]
Issue History
Date | Label | Format | Number |
1981 |
Electra |
Stereo LP |
VE-601 |
Cassette |
VC-601 |
1983 |
MCA Videodisc Inc |
Videodisc |
17-011 |
1984, 1988 |
MCA Videocassette Inc |
VHS NTSC |
VHS 71012 |
1998 |
Electra |
CD |
7559-60586-2 |
2001 |
Broadway Theatre Archive |
VHS NTSC |
[unnumbered] |
2002 |
Kultur |
DVD |
B00006RCMW |
Marc Shepherd, oakapple@cris.com
Copyright ©1995-2005. All Rights Reserved.
Last Modified: 5-Apr-03
URL: http://www.cris.com/~oakapple/gasdisc/pirpapp.htm
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