I thought I would introduce my pirate-mad Perfect Non-Reader to Gilbert and Sullivan with The Pirates of Penzance. I got the video of the Kevin Kline film, which is pretty good, on the whole. She liked it, more or less, although she didn’t love it, and didn’t find any of it very funny.
She had the book to read along (mine is in a paperback Complete G&S, not annotated but with Mr. Gilbert’s drawings), and spent a fair amount of it staring at the book rather than at the screen, and complaining when the film skipped around. I spent a lot of it explaining what was going on, who various people were and what they were trying to do. Not a huge success, but not too bad.
My own first G&S was The Mikado, I think. I had my mothers Complete G&S with the same drawings (in fact, I think the same page layout) and several of the recordings. I can’t say for sure which I listened to first. But I’m sure I saw a version of The Mikado for children, on stage I mean, when I was quite young. A bit later, PBS showed the BBC series of all the operas. I’ve seen two or three of them on stage, over the years. Not very many; I never particularly sought out opportunities to see them.
Reading through the text, I was again struck by the cynical attitude toward the aristocracy. The infamous Pirates are, at the last moment, revealed to be noblemen, so they are forgiven their crimes, and the Major-General has no objection to former pirates as daughters-in-law. It’s not quite as cynical as Pinafore, when the Captain and the Tar are discovered to have been switched at birth, and therefore are switched back, taking each others’ jobs immediately, with (of course) no training at all. The only thing required for the Captaincy is birth, just as the only thing required for the Lord Admiralty is an unswerving and unthinking loyalty to the Prime Minister. In Pirates, of course, there’s the added note about Major-General Stanley’s ancestors having been only recently purchased, making his social-climbing and snobbery just a trifle nastier.
It’s all in fun, though.
Tolerabimus quod tolerare debemus,
-Vardibidian.