Prudence at Penzance

THERE ARE, if recent productions are any indication, two ways to stage The Pirates of Penzance today. One is to find a couple of sultry rock and roll sexpots to sing the leads, tinkering around with Sir Arthur Sullivan's score a little to make the romantic Victorian solos sound more like "It's So Easy to Fall in Love." The other is to follow the sturdy set of schticks that has been handed down virtually unchanged over the years since the operetta's debut a century ago with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. To his credit, Paul O'Neill has chosen a middle ground in his direction of the Harvard Gilbert and Sullivan Players' fine new production of Pirates, bringing a few prudent but innovative changes on the time-worn D'Oyly Carte version.

From the opening scene this version is a Pirates with something extra. The curtains open to reveal the familiar ocean-side scene--a deep-blue flat at the back of the stage--that Gilbert and Sullivan audiences have grown accustomed to over the last hundred years. And then, incredibly, the Pirate King and Frederic, the pirate-apprentice, make a breathtaking entrance rowing in on a life-sized dinghy.

In the Pirate King's celebrated solo ("...and it is, it is a glorious thing to be a pirate king!"), O'Neill deals out another wild-card. The king sings his first two choruses gesturing nobly with his broadsword, hoisting it into the air, as pirate kings always do.

But for the last chorus, a pirate sidekick appears with a small bird-cage, which the king solemnly takes up and proceeds to give the broadsword treatment. To the chorus's strains of "hurrah for the pirate king," the song concludes with the king in an epic pose, with his new weapon, holding it above his head in an outstretched arm, completely oblivious to the fact that it is not Excalibur. It is an inspired and unprecedented touch that instantly reveals the winsome befuddlement of a buccanneer who refuses to plunder orphans and yields at once when Queen Victoria's name is involved.

One of the most memorable moments in the show was a third O'Neill inspiration, during the entrance of the female chorus. It is an entrance Gilbert wrote again and again: a troop of 19th-century teenyboppers--cheerful, bordering on birdbrained--appears, "gaily tripping, lightly skipping," "tripping hither, tripping hither," or, in this case, "climbing over rocky mountain, skipping rivulet and fountain." True to form, this batch of maidens comes merrily onstage, chirping away with nothing graver on their minds than their "fleeting leisure"--all except one. While her sisters hop and dance at the front of the stage, she lingers behind to collect samples of leaves and sand and record prissy little notes in a black book she carries. It is an idea whose time is long overdue: a pre-med in a G&S chorus.

O'Neill has been blessed with a strong complement of actors and singers in the lead roles, but only two have a crucial element that earns them special praise. Tom Uskali as the Pirate King rivals Groucho in his mastery of greasepaint-mustache manipulation but never descends to slapstick. Uskali's perpetual air of bemusement gives lines like "our revenge will be swift and terrible" a wonderful screwball appeal.

As the Sergeant of Police, John Sneath has a chance to display his sensationally rich baritone. Sneath is another gifted deadpan comic--at times, a shade too deadpan, perhaps. One wishes he would give his role just the smallest extra measure of hamming-up; as it is, he narrowly misses blending in with his force of policeman choristers altogether.

Uskali and Sneath have one thing in common that the four other leads glaringly lack: a bursar's card. Jayne S. West (Mabel) and William R. Monnen (Fredric) are voice students at the Boston Conservatory of Music, and Dennis Crowley (Major-General) and Hope Devenish (Ruth) are grown-up singers with several years of professional experience. All four have--as their parts call for--first-rate voices, but their advanced years make their performances troublesome.

It is not so much that they look older than their roles (although the relationship of West and the other women in the cast, most of whom are ostensibly her fellow wards, does seem more like babysitter than sister). But they do look older than anyone else on stage, and consequently, their various excesses--incessant mugging from Devenish, a curious lack of passion from West, and a slightly humorless, banker-like mien from Crowley--are all the more pronounced.

One can't help expecting an exceptional performance from actors of an exceptional age. The Gilbert and Sullivan Players get only one from their four imports--Monnen is sweet-voiced and convincing in the perilously starry-eyed role of Frederic. He has the rare ability of keeping a straight face--and keeping the audiences' faces straight--while he slings around such epithets as "blushing buds of everblooming beauty."

But it defies the spirit of a college production to stack the cast with ringers, of whatever talent. The Gilbert and Sullivan Players is the only theater group on campus that shies away from filling its ranks with undergraduates; what they gain in vocal talent, they more than lose in raw, youthful enthusiasm and appeal. In this production, at least, the players would have done well to turn their recruiting energies to the orchestra, which sounds regrettably soggy under Todd Ellison's direction, and the lighting, which, in Gil Ohana's design, seems to follow the rock-concert theory of brightening or dimming as the music gets louder or softer.