Much has changed in New York City since the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players last presented their G & S Fest. When we last saw that "very model of a modern major general" in June 2008, Lehman Brothers still had their cufflinks tidily on their wrists. New York audiences, much like William Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's Victorian audiences, sat in a time of prosperity. Now, there are few calm and collected models of a modern CEO. After an "unwanted but necessary" hiatus, as described by artistic director Albert Bergeret, the broad comedies and gentle satires of Gilbert & Sullivan return to New York City Center to audiences now in need of a good laugh so much more than that 2008 audience.
Gilbert and Sullivan wrote their comic operas during the great Pax Britannica, a long period of peace and prosperity in Victorian England – a time of peace if you consider peace being a colonial power from sea to shining sea and waging war with everyone to stay that way. Librettist Gilbert's benign satire was a product of a long ago flourishing economy. Then there were no broad targets for satire. Today, despite the pirates who lurk in hedge funds and off the coast of Somalia, audiences laugh with impunity at cowardly constables and birthdays that fall on leap days.
The famous story is a slight one. A young pirate with a slavish devotion to duty fulfills his years of service to the Pirate King, or thinks he has. He leaves his nursemaid and pirate kin, and falls in love with the daughter of a military commander, the natural enemy to his old boss. How can this all be reconciled except with song and dance and pun?
Despite an unfortunate wig here and there, and a couple of the four and twenty daughters of the major general who look to be closer in age to 47-year-old nursemaid Ruth than love interest Mabel, The Pirates of Penzance has returned with joy and rapture to City Center.
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