‘Pirates! The Penzance Musical’ Broadway Review: David Hyde Pierce Is The Very Model Of A Musical-Comedy Charmer

Gilbert & Sullivan sticklers might need about 20 minutes to fall under the spell of Roundabout’s Pirates! The Penzance Musical, opening tonight on Broadway at the Todd Haimes Theatre, but for the rest of us the delight is pretty much instantaneous. Reimagined to include, as the production notes state, “Caribbean rhythms and French Quarter flair,” this spicing up of the beloved 1830 operetta is a charmer. A trifle maybe, but a charmer.

Sticking fairly close to the G&S plot and characters, the Roundabout production – the project was conceived by conceived by director Scott Ellis, composer Rupert Holmes (who did the adaptation), choreographer Warren Carlyle and musical director and orchestrator Joseph Joubert – has assembled a top-notch cast that knows how to bring the joy and silliness to a high-spirited romp like this.

Ramin Karimloo (Funny Girl) plays the Pirate King, Jinkx Monsoon (TV’s RuPaul’s Drag Race, Broadway’s Chicago) is Ruth, the maid and mother figure to the pirates), David Hyde Pierce plays both W.S. Gilbert (in a framing device) and, most deliciously, Major General Stanley, that very model of a modern major general. Nicholas Barasch, who just might be the musical’s MVP, is apprentice swashbuckler Frederic, who falls in love with one of the Major’s daughters, the beautiful Mabel (Samantha Williams).

Playing out on a New Orleans street set designed more or less as a cartoon by David Rockwell, its pirates costumed by Linda Cho in ragamuffin seafaring garb that nonetheless allows for the odd pleasing splash of color, Pirates! follows the the familiar plot: When a pirate ship docks in 1830s New Orleans, the roughneck swashbucklers decide to go ashore and find wives. And the wives they find are the daughters of the Major General, who isn’t having it.

But young, naive Frederic actually finds his soulmate in Mabel, despite the protestations of his nanny Ruth. Way back when, Ruth, hard of hearing, mistook her master’s instruction to care for baby Frederic by making him apprentice to a riverboat pilot. She heard pirate, so here they are, stuck until Frederic reaches his 21st birthday.

Which actually is just around the corner, until jealous Ruth and the Pirate King rule that since Frederic was born on a leap day, those 21 February 29s birthdays must be counted individually. Farce ensues.

If the cast seems instructed to play just a tad broadly, and hit the jokes a touch to hard, and the second act runs a bit too long, well, the overzealousness does little to dampen the overall joyous vibe. And just when things might start to lag, Pierce arrives, nailing every pun, every aside to the audience, every double-take and every droll observation. He’s a treasure.

Karimloo, who more often plays serious types, brings a nice bit of comic undertones to the Pirate King, and Monsoon is an absolute hoot as the needy, conniving pirate nanny. All handle their vocal duties well, but Barasch, who made his Broadway debut at 10 in the 2009 revival of West Side Story, is the ringer here. His performance of the show opener “Good Morning” gets things off to a rousing start, and his numbers with Karimloo and Monsoon are high points.

Borrowing “We’re All From Someplace Else” from Gilbert & Sullivan’s HMS Pinafore for the finale, Pirates! ends its tale with a generous plea for tolerance – swashbucklers are people too, after all – and having built up enough good well over the previous couple of hours the underlying earnestness at show’s end seems absolutely deserved.

Title: Pirates! The Penzance Musical
Venue: Broadway’s Todd Haimes Theatre
Director: Scott Ellis
Music And Libretto: Arthur Sullivan and W.S. Gilbert
Adaptation: Rupert Holmes
Cast: Ramin Karimloo, Jinkx Monsoon, David Hyde Pierce, Nicholas Barasch, Preston Truman Boyd and Samantha Williams. The cast also includes Kelly Belarmino, Maria Briggs, Cicily Daniels, Ninako Donville, Alex Dorf, Rick Faugno, Niani Feelings, Tommy Gedrich, Alex Gibson, Afra Hines, Dan Hoy, Ryo Kamibayashi, Tatiana Lofton, Nathan Lucrezio, Shina Ann Morris, Tyrone L. Robinson, Cooper Stanton, and Bronwyn Tarboton.
Running time: 2 hr 15 min (including intermission)