The Pirates of Penzance
JULY 7 & 8, 2022 | 7:30 P.M.
JULY 10, 2022 | 3:00 P.M.
MUSIC HALL
Music by Arthur Sullivan
Libretto by W.S. Gilbert
Sung in English with projected lyrics
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The Story
Off the coast of England, Frederic, a young man of 21, celebrates the end of his apprenticeship to a band of pirates. He believes the pirate way of life is wicked, and that the crew should consider a respectable lifestyle. The Pirate King claims that, compared to a respectable lifestyle, piracy is honest.
Frederic prepares to leave the pirate ship with his nursemaid Ruth in tow. On the beach, they stumble upon a group of beautiful young women. Frederic asks them to help him reform from his pirate life. All reject him except Mabel, and the two quickly fall in love.
The pirates return to storm the beach and capture the young women, intending to marry them. The women’s father, the Major-General, arrives and objects to his daughters being married against their will. To save them, he claims to be an orphan. As orphans themselves, the pirates are sympathetic and agree to release their captives.
Later at home, the Major-General laments his lie, and his daughters try to comfort him. The police sergeant arrives and tells them that with Frederic’s help, he is prepared to arrest the pirates. Frederic considers this an opportunity to atone for a life of piracy. The Pirate King and Ruth arrive and inform him that he was to be apprenticed until his 21st birthday and, as he was born in a leap year on February 29, he is actually only 5 years old. The Pirate King insists that Frederic honor his sense of duty and return to the pirates. Upon realizing this, Frederic tells the Pirate King of the impending attack.
Before leaving, Frederic meets with Mabel to tell her of his plight, and they agree to be faithful to each other until his return. Mabel tells the police that they will have to face the pirates alone, not knowing the pirates are planning an attack of their own.
The pirates attack the Major-General’s house and easily subdue the police. The sergeant begs for mercy in the name of Queen Victoria. Ruth reveals that the pirates are in fact nobility, and the pirates free the Major-General out of their sense of loyalty to the Queen. The Major-General, happy to have his daughters wed noblemen, offers the pirates their hands in marriage as thanks. All join in celebration of the approaching weddings.
–Courtesy of Lyric Opera of Kansas City
In Performance
The Pirates of Penzance’s most famous music is an ironic example of the piracy Gilbert and Sullivan despised. The second-act chorus “Come Friends Who Plow the Seas” became “Hail! Hail! The Gang’s All Here!” in the U.S. as early as 1898. In 1915, it found its way into The Ohio State University’s fight song “Across the Field.”
“I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” is Gilbert and Sullivan’s best-known patter song, a dizzying sequence of ingenious rhymes sung at breathtaking speed. The song is a proving ground for contemporary lyricists who take on everything from biblical philology, the Periodic Table, Animaniacs, and of course, politics.
The heroine Mabel gets a star turn with “Poor Wandering One,” a coloratura aria featuring plenty of passages ascending into the stratosphere and a final high C that dazzles as much as anything Rossini or Donizetti penned.
–Anne Arenstein
The performance will last approximately 2 hours and 25 minutes.
There will be one intermission.