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Pirates! Is the Very Model of a Modern Major Debacle
The ever-delightful David Hyde Pierce can’t disguise that Gilbert and Sullivan’s confectionery operetta has been keelhauled.
Everything from the show’s marketing to its opening sequence—in which Gilbert and Sullivan themselves, in the persons of David Hyde Pierce and Preston Truman Boyd, make a cameo to walk us through what we’re about to see—drives home in no uncertain terms that this Pirates has been transferred from the rocky coasts of Cornwall to the Big Easy. The original Pirates —which tells the story of the young apprentice Frederic (here played by Nicholas Barasch) as he attempts to leave the buccaneering life to pursue virtue and love, then finds himself snared by wonderfully absurd dilemmas of duty—is a near flawless example of smart-dumb. false one, you have deceiv’d me”) axed in the first act only to be compensated with a particularly cringey version of The Mikado ’s “Alone, and Yet Alive” in the second — but Pierce makes genuinely delightful work of “The Nightmare Song,” its fretful patter borrowed from Iolanthe to relaunch the show after intermission.
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