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New York Times
25-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
Review: Gilbert and Sullivan's ‘Pirates,' Now in Jazzy New Orleans
W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, the operetta kings of 19th-century Britain, had a hit in America with 'H.M.S. Pinafore,' but they reaped no American fortune from it. Instead, lacking U.S. copyright protection, their glorious piffle spread in the States like spring colds, causing fits of laughter but returning no royalties. By the time the team from London arrived in Manhattan in late 1878, bringing the real thing with them, 15 pirate productions were already running. Is it any wonder that their next operetta, in 1879, was called, with a wink, 'The Pirates of Penzance'? And that they opened it in New York instead of London to avoid the financial fate of 'Pinafore'? Gilbert and Sullivan were sharp satirists but also savvy businessmen. More than any of their 13 other so-called Savoy operas, 'Pirates' has borne that out, returning to Broadway regularly ever since. (The Public Theater's 1981 revival, starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt, ran longer than any previous production anywhere.) For a work so old, in such a seemingly passé genre, whose touchstones and targets are literally Victorian, that's astonishing: a tribute to the resilience of Gilbert's words, the delight of Sullivan's music and our willingness to make common cause with the past. Though jolly enough, the latest Broadway incarnation, which opened on Thursday at the Todd Haimes Theater, trusts neither the material nor us as much as it might. Clumsily but accurately retitled 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical,' and transported to post-Reconstruction New Orleans, it is also significantly altered in tone. Except for the central performance by David Hyde Pierce, marvelously underplaying the tongue-twisting Major-General, the production has a sweaty quality, bordering on frenzy, that's hopelessly at odds with the cool wit of the original. Perhaps the sweat is a nod to the story's steamy new location, or a sign of the effort it took to get it there. As adapted by Rupert Holmes, and directed by Scott Ellis, 'Pirates' now takes place in a French Quarter theater — a clever touch, given Louisiana's historic proximity to actual piracy, but one that requires laborious workarounds and, apparently, an uplifting lesson. Piffle is better light than heavy, and preferably without a moral. Indeed, there is something essentially dry about the original operetta, whose tricky, twitty humor marks the beginning of a line that extends to Monty Python and beyond. The pirates score no plunder because their king (Ramin Karimloo) is sentimental about orphans, being one himself, and 'word has gotten around.' (Their intended victims are all mysteriously parentless.) The craven police are less than heartened when Mabel (Samantha Williams), the comeliest of the Major-General's daughters, sings them rousingly into battle: 'Go ye heroes, go and die!' Such nonsense isn't just decorative, it's structural, turning the plot. As a child, Frederic (Nicholas Barasch) was supposed to be apprenticed to a pilot until his 21st birthday, but his nurse, Ruth (Jinkx Monsoon), misheard the instruction, apprenticing him instead to a pirate. Years later, on the last day of his indenture, anticipating his marriage to Mabel, he receives bad news from the jealous Ruth. Having been born, she says, in a leap year, on Feb. 29, he has celebrated only five birthdays. A self-described slave to duty, he resolves to remain with the pirates as specified, asking Mabel if she'd mind waiting the 60-some years to wed him. 'It seems so long,' she sings. Those jokes still work, but not everything survives the long journey from the original setting on the sleepy Cornwall coast. In particular, Gilbert's primary satire, of the English gentry, is unsalvageable. Only in Britain could his resolution make sense, when it is revealed that the pirates are 'all noblemen who have gone wrong': 'With all their faults, they love their queen.' Instead, taking cues from the Creole culture of New Orleans, Holmes steers the plot toward an uplifting if unconvincing new finale invoking the idea of America as 'a patchwork, scratchwork nation' of immigrants. That nifty phrase notwithstanding, his lyrics, supplanting perhaps half the originals, are rarely as neat and thus rarely as funny as Gilbert's. Sullivan fares better. Though his style is typically formal and foursquare — we get a hit of his hymn 'Onward, Christian Soldiers' at the start — music is inherently more flexible than words. Flexible enough to make Sullivan swing, though? Well, yes. The heavy rejiggering of the 'Pirates' songs (as well as borrowings from 'Pinafore,' 'The Mikado' and 'Iolanthe') has been exceptionally well managed to honor the city's melting pot of influences. Scents of jazz, blues, Dixieland, boogie-woogie, soft-shoe, calypso, rag and rumba waft by in catchy new arrangements. (The music director is Joseph Joubert; he and Daryl Waters devised the orchestrations.) I was too sonically satisfied to mind the unlikeliness, in a quasi-classical work, of a finale featuring an orchestra of washboards. It is not a non sequitur to mention here Karimloo's athletic performance, hanging off a galleon and leaping over barrels (sets by David Rockwell) in abs-baring costumes by Linda Cho. Monsoon's Ruth, enhanced with an unnecessary second-act number from 'The Mikado,' is more saloon wench than nursemaid, but her turn is rowdy camp fun nonetheless. Williams's Mabel is as fetching and beamish as Donald Holder's colorful lighting, and the ensemble, especially when performing Warren Carlyle's choreography, is very hard-working. That's fine, if not very operetta. I wish Ellis's direction had taken more direction from Pierce's pickled deadpan; with his absurd facial hair (by Charles G. LaPointe) and rum-blossom nose, he needs little else to get his laughs. Really, the less he does the funnier it is, because his stillness helps us focus on the words, which are otherwise too often difficult to discern in this production. For once, that can't be blamed on the sound design, which Mikaal Sulaiman has mercifully kept at moderate volume. The problem is that the musical-theater style of the adaptation is not ideally suited to the density of Gilbert's verse. Despite such mismatches between the original and the remake, 'Pirates!' is still a feather in the tricorn of the Roundabout Theater Company, which produced and nurtured it. Operettas don't last 146 years just because they're good. (I love Gilbert and Sullivan's 'Ruddigore' too, but have never seen it except at camp.) Longevity like that requires faith not only in the past but also in the future. So if 'Pirates!' finds a forever home, or even just a temporary one, in New Orleans — celebrating 'the land of the clean slate, the blank canvas, the new beginning,' as the Major-General declares in his new peroration — so be it. Even those savvy Savoyards might approve.
New York Times
17-04-2025
- Entertainment
- New York Times
A Monsoon Is About to Hit These Pirates
As she prepared to discuss a part in the upcoming Broadway show 'Pirates! The Penzance Musical' with the director Scott Ellis, Jinkx Monsoon had only one outcome in mind. 'I knew I was going in for a meeting, but I wanted to leave with that role,' she said in a recent conversation. And she was not coy about it. 'The first thing she said was, 'I've never wanted anything more than this,'' Ellis recalled, laughing. Now Monsoon is above the show's title in playbills, alongside Ramin Karimloo and David Hyde Pierce. A lifetime of hard work has added up. 'I've done so many freaking things!' Monsoon said. 'I've been a stand-up comedian, I've been a singer and a dancer and a stripper. I think auctioneer is one thing I haven't done.' A two-time winner of 'RuPaul's Drag Race,' Monsoon, 37, a Portland, Ore., native, has an eclectic résumé that includes cabaret shows, guest starring on 'Doctor Who' and a wildly popular seasonal bauble, 'The Jinkx & DeLa Holiday Show' (created and performed with BenDeLaCreme). When she made her Broadway debut in January 2023 as Matron 'Mama' Morton in 'Chicago,' casual — or perhaps cynical — observers might have assumed she was just another TV personality crossing off another item on her wish list, like headlining Carnegie Hall. (Monsoon did that, too, in February.) Instead it was a big step toward her end goal. She then took an even bigger step, professionally and personally, last year, when she was cast as Audrey in the hit Off Broadway revival of 'Little Shop of Horrors' and ended up surprising even people who know her well. 'Earnest in the past was a challenge for Jinkx,' her longtime collaborator BenDeLaCreme said in a phone conversation. 'She really got uncomfortable if people weren't laughing for any duration. But when she performed in 'Little Shop,' she was willing to lean into the real pathos of this character.' This new willingness to expose vulnerability may well derive from an increased sense of confidence in herself: Being cast as Audrey was a major step in Monsoon's decision to medically transition. Her growth as an actress is evident in the new Broadway production of 'Pirates' (in previews at the Todd Haimes Theater), which relocates the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta to New Orleans and adorns it with jazzy arrangements. She plays Ruth, a zany maid who cavorts with a merry band of pirates led by Karimloo and pines for the fetching Frederic (Nicholas Barasch). Monsoon did so well during rehearsals that she earned Ruth an extra number, 'Alone, and Yet Alive,' on loan from 'The Mikado.' For Pierce, it was all a bit of déjà vu. 'What springs to mind is what it was like to work with Bette Midler on 'Hello, Dolly!' he said over the phone. 'Because Jinkx is a pro and she's been around the block, and she's gifted in so many ways. She's an incredible singer and has found all the different ways to manage her particular style of vocal production. She's a fantastic mimic. And she's just funny,' he continued, with an expletive for emphasis. 'Another similarity is that Jinkx is there for the collaboration, to work with everybody, as was Bette.' Over the course of two conversations, Monsoon discussed what being an actress means to her, her relatively recent decision to transition and what grounds her performances. These are edited and condensed excerpts from those conversations. What was the beginning of your acting career like? I was told in high school I had to tone it down if I wanted to be serious as an actor. In college I convinced myself that I had to give up drag and focus on being malleable and versatile. Guess what? All I got cast as was female roles and some little-boy characters. No one was going to call me in for a female lead. I auditioned for the chaperone in 'The Drowsy Chaperone' in Seattle, and I believe the consensus was there was no way I could do that eight times a week. Why was that? I think they thought I had party tricks but not sustainability, because the world has for a long time diminished the talent of drag queens. I did experience push and pull from people wanting to see me for female roles and other people in the creative team being like, 'No, she's a drag queen, she can maybe do it once but there's no way she could carry a show.' What did you learn from being in 'Chicago'? I noticed that with the actors, no two performances were identical yet the intention was always the same. I realized it's not about learning the perfect way to deliver the line and then delivering it that way every time without fail — it was about learning the true intention behind the scene and then just having the conversation with the actors. Once I started doing that, I started getting to that nirvana place where I was thinking the thoughts of the character. You're sitting there actually thinking, 'Oh my gosh, I can't believe Roxie Hart just said that.' Were you surprised to get the call for Audrey? I've always thought I could play Audrey amazingly, but I never thought anyone would even look at me for her, so I had this dream of playing Audrey II, the plant. I wanted to play its voice until it was big enough, and then it blooms into a personification of the plant and I would be like Poison Ivy. So my agent calls and says they wanted me to audition for Audrey. I was like, 'You mean Audrey II?' He goes, 'No, Audrey.' And I was like, 'Yeah, but the plant is named after her so they want me to audition for Audrey II.' And he goes, 'No, Jinkx, they want you to audition for Audrey. Not the plant, the human being.' I was shocked and stunned. What was it like landing this dream role? Being cast as Audrey was what gave me permission to finally begin my medical transition. It was like, 'I think the world's ready to see you as an actress. They don't need to see you as a drag queen, they don't need you to perform maleness for them anymore — they see you as the actress you wanted to be.' The world is at a place where they're ready to see me, and that's thanks to people like Peppermint, Angelica Ross, Laverne Cox, Varla Jean Merman — all of these people who have been playing roles that weren't expected for them to play, and doing it well and showing everyone we're just actors. So in a way a performance inspired a decision that meant ending a performance? Drag gave a place for my femininity to live, and for a long time it was good enough. When I came out as nonbinary, it was because I realized I didn't want to keep performing maleness. But being nonbinary I was still setting these rules on myself, like I was adamant about androgyny, about not being too masculine and too feminine. I've always been visibly queer and I was scared that taking it a step further was just going to make my life miserable. It doesn't look like it did. Getting cast as Audrey was kind of like, 'Oh, I'm an actress.' I started wearing dresses. I started walking my walk every day — there is something in my mind like, 'This is the walk Audrey would do.' It was slurs being yelled at me and sometimes it was catcalls, sometimes it was lecherous looks. But it wasn't any different from before I transitioned. Like, whatever, I've been called slurs my whole life. But I am now this person I imagined in my head my whole life, that I thought was inaccessible to me. And I just [expletive] love every second of it. How do you see the character of Ruth? She's become a very relatable character in spite of her really kooky circumstances. She doesn't really have big flowery speeches or big emphatic monologues like other characters, but I do have a couple songs that really allow for some storytelling and allow you inside the heart and mind of this iteration of Ruth. You seem to have an unerring sense of how to land a joke while keeping Ruth grounded. They trust me to know what's funny, and that's because of the years I spent doing what I've done. You don't have to start at the very bottom and crawl on your belly through glass to get to the top — there's plenty of ways and plenty of people have skipped that step. But I started at the very bottom. I was a drag queen performing in dive bars at 17 years old to audiences of four people with a dressing room full of cockroaches. I can't think of more bottom [laughs]. I performed on the streets of Portland, Oregon, for coins and dollars. Do you think that's why your performances feel so lived in? You know that song 'I'm Still Here' from 'Follies'? When I get to sing that someday, it's going to be [expletive] real for me. It's real for me now. [laughs] When I sing it at my next Carnegie show, or my last Carnegie show, it is going to be earned. And I'm really excited for that.
