Pirates of Penzance the Hypocrites

Three 1/2 Stars  - Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 12/15/10 - "This is how creativity can flourish when a work is allowed to pass into the public domain.... "I kept thinking about how much Gilbert would have liked it. And of all Graney's many non-traditional creations in this town over the last few years, this is certainly among my favorites."

Highly Recommended - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Suntimes 12/14/10 - "giddy, ever-buoyant, freshly reinvented revival...a zany delight from start to finish". 

Criti'cs Pick - John Beer, TimeOut Chicago 12/30/10 - "an exceptionally fun evening" 

Criti'cs Pick - WBEZ Dueling Critics

Thu-Sat 730p; Sun 3p.  Plus Jan 19 and 26  at 730p; Jan 22 and 29 at 3p.  No shows 12/24-1/2/11

$28/14.  More info 773-989-7352


12/9/2010 - 1/30/11

Thu-Sat 730p; Sun 3p


Three 1/2 Stars Chris Jones, Chicago Tribune 12/15/10 - "With cat-like tred — and in the dying embers of the theatrical year — that cheeky Sean Graney, the very model of the modern conceptual director, has pulled out quite a delicious little off-Loop version of “The Pirates of Penzance.” This is not your father’s Gilbert and Sullivan. The Hypocrites’ 80-minute, promenade-style “Pirates” nonetheless is wholly true to the topsy-turvy spirit of W.S. Gilbert, and it features some spectacularly audacious arrangements of the melodic song stylings of Arthur Sullivan, here vivaciously rendered on everything from guitars to banjos to, memorably, a surprisingly tuneful saw.

And, remarkably, the actors play all their own music as they bring to life Kevin O’Donnell hilariously wacky and beguiling orchestrations. This is how creativity can flourish when a work is allowed to pass into the public domain.

Graney and his designer, Tom Burch, have transformed the basement of the Chopin Theatre into a gloriously conceived environment that suggests the back porch of a Key West bar. It’s hard to overstate how appealing it is to wander in the door, kick the snow and ice off your frozen shoes and head into what truly feels like some warped, parrot-headed resort. Actors mostly are in shorts and sun-dresses, a wooden pier stretches the length of the performance space, hundreds of miniature lights blink and chase overhead and little swimming pools dot the landscape. Some in the house were sporting sunglasses. You’re free either to move around or kick back.

That said, the concept doesn’t overwhelm the material. Well, not so that it matters. “Pirates,” which has a preposterous Victorian plot wherein one Frederic finds himself indentured to gentle souls who worship the skull and crossbones yet protect orphans, has a natural aquatic setting and is perfectly well served by anachronisms. Heck, it depends on them.

“Pirates” also bops along very cheerfully when reduced to 80 minutes. Graney’s brand of fun is smart not to outstay its welcome and he’s found a variety of clever ways to reduce the cast size, including the brilliant inspired doubling of Ruth and Mabel (Christine Stulik), the two very different kinds of women who occupy the minds of our dutiful Frederic (honestly played by Zeke Sulkes). And when a little clutch of footlights suddenly emerge from the floor of the promenade, Graney plays plenty of homage to the source.

Be warned that, overall, the singing here is not up to the top-tier, light-opera standards to which Gilbert-and-Sullivan aficionados are accustomed. If it were, this thing would really be something. But the singing is at least adequate. (Sometimes better; you could stack up Matt Kahler’s patter-loving Major General against any.) And the staging is so inventive, the famous police ditty, “When the Foeman Bares His Steel,” will be the funniest you’ve seen or heard. Graney has a lot of fun with some of the class and gender-assumptions in the piece — mixing in a bit of outside music; I think I detected a bit of George Michael and he finds ways to introduce some John Lennon accents.

But this is not some egregiously moderne take-down. It is an irreverent and fresh homage and entirely safe for Gilbert-and-Sullivan fans — and you know who you are — to attend and enjoy. Indeed, it would be an article of faith to do so. I kept thinking about how much Gilbert would have liked it. And of all Graney’s many non-traditional creations in this town over the last few years, this is certainly among my favorites"



Highly Recommended - Hedy Weiss, Chicago Sun Times 12/14/10 - "Britain was a great seafaring nation in 1879, when Gilbert and Sullivan, that zany team of satirical operetta writers (and in many ways precursors to Monty Python), penned their ever-popular show “The Pirates of Penzance.”

The story they told — of a seaman who has reached his 21st birthday, but who faces many obstacles as he hopes to be promoted from “indentured” apprentice to the rank of full-blown pirate ­— captured the watery world of that island nation, and poked fun at the exaggerated sense of duty and fair-thinking so pervasive in 19th century English society.

In his giddy, ever-buoyant, freshly reinvented revival of the show for the Hypocrites (yes, the same company that did such a knockout job on “Our Town” a couple of seasons back), director Sean Graney has stepped up to the helm of this goofy classic and distilled it down to a salty 80 minutes. In the process — with the expert assistance of musical arranger Kevin O’Donnell — he has turned it into the very model of a thoroughly hip and playfully modern piece of musical theater. Happily, he also never loses sight of the show’s Victorian world view, with its devotion to the queen, its preoccupation with orphans and bumbling policemen and wedding etiquette. And the result is a zany delight from start to finish.

Though I am no big fan of the promenade style Graney often favors, this time around it works ideally. He has perfected the technique so that the action is organized and connected to the text, as well as consistently visible to the ambulatory crowd that “follows” each scene as it shifts from place to place. (The view also is ideal from the 10 plastic beach chairs provided for those who prefer not to move.)

In addition, set designer Tom Burch has created a sparkling water world — with a boardwalk and pier environment along the lines of that in Brighton, England; lights strung overhead (cheers for designer Jared Moore); blue plastic kiddy swimming pools perched atop tables; and the walls of Chopin Theatre’s studio space painted a weatherbeaten blue.

All the crucial classic songs from the Gilbert and Sullivan show are here, but O’Donnell has supplied zesty new arrangements for them, and at various moments, the lively, comically and vocally talented cast of 10 creates its own accompaniment on guitars, banjo, accordion, clarinet, violin, harmonica and helmet top.

Zeke Sulkes is wonderfully engaging as Frederic, the hapless young indenture who unfortunately happened to have a Leap Year birthday. And with her goofy spirit and coloratura voice, Christine Sulik is a marvel as both Ruth, Frederic’s homely middle-aged nurse, and Mabel, his fetching beloved.

Matt Kahler, large and fleet, is an ideally pompous and sentimental Major General. And Robert McLean is an authoritative Pirate King. Becky Poole, Emily Casey and Nikki Klix are savvy and adorable as the Major General’s naughty, sweet-voiced, marriageable daughters. And Ryan Bourque, Doug Pawlik and Shawn Pfautsch are the high-stepping, soft-hearted pirates.

Maureen Janson’s choreography is pure fun, and is deftly executed, and Alison Siple’s costumes are full of ingenuity and wit.

With “The Mikado” at Lyric Opera, and “Pirates” at the Chopin, Chicago might well be dubbed Gilbert and Sullivan central at the moment. Happy sailing".


"Smooth operetta" - Kris Vire, TimeOut Chicago 12/9/10 -  "I like humans existing in a state of absurdity and trying to gather meaning from the disjointed world around them. And Pirates definitely fits that description,” director Sean Graney says of his latest project, The Pirates of Penzance.

The Gilbert and Sullivan operetta marks the busy Hypocrites artistic director’s second musical foray and the 13-year-old company’s third (Graney directed The Threepenny Opera in 2008, while Matt Hawkins mounted Cabaret last season). “The Hypocrites wanted to continue that trend,” Graney tells me in an e-mail exchange. “But with extreme budget cuts, we didn’t think it would be possible to pay the royalties that accompany most musicals.” The 121-year-old Pirates, however, is in the public domain.

“Like most ‘serious’ theater people, I had written the show off as fluff,” Graney says. “But once I really listened to it, I was like, God this is good, what was my problem?”

The goofy plot centers on Frederic, an orphan raised by a band of well-mannered swashbucklers. Released from servitude on his 21st birthday, Frederic meets his love interest, Mabel, and her sisters, who get kidnapped by the pirates. The girls’ father gets the show’s most famous number, the much-imitated patter song “I Am the Very Model of the Modern Major-General.”

“Most people mock [the show] because they feel it’s too whimsical,” Graney says, “but I find a very respectfully subversive intelligence to the writing.”“Respectfully subversive” isn’t a bad way to describe Graney’s own aesthetic in recent years. The puckish, thrift store–dapper 38-year-old turned both Oedipus and Strindberg’s Miss Julie into debris-strewn rock & roll three-handers for the Hypocrites. After directing a smashing rendition of the quick-change farce The Mystery of Irma Vep last season at Court Theatre, he gave a similar treatment to The Comedy of Errors this fall, stripping Shakespeare’s farce down to a six-actor, modern-language piece of metatheater.

When it works, which it often does, Graney’s approach provides a new avenue into a play’s core meaning. “The best way I can find the spirit of any play written over a century ago,” he says, “is to have a more casual relationship with the text. And reducing cast sizes adds to the dialogue between the actor and the audience—an actor gets to present many different characters and philosophies.”

“Sean knows how to structure a text so there’s this lightning-fast, sharp-edged humor that’s all grounded in the material and yet seems completely spontaneous,” says Court Theatre artistic director Charles Newell. “He makes a reduced cast a virtue as opposed to, Well, we don’t have enough money to do this.”

Yet Graney genially acknowledges his technique doesn’t always succeed. His recent student production of Molière’s Tartuffe at Northwestern “was a lot of fun, but the final product was not entirely successful because I reduced the script too much and ended up missing some essential elements of the play.”

For Pirates, Graney’s going a little more traditional, though “I also wouldn’t call it straightforward.” The cast is reduced to ten actors who perform multiple roles and play their own instruments in lieu of an orchestra. That said, Graney notes, “I didn’t change one word before we got into rehearsals. The original plan was for me to adapt the libretto and have [Hypocrites artistic associate] Kevin O’Donnell rearrange the music. But as I dug more deeply into the poetry, I found it near perfect.”

Despite his affinity for reducing and reconstructing texts, Graney says he’s not “trying to create a brand; that would be a little death to me. When artists try to maintain what they have been known for, it becomes a watery carbon copy, an idea rather than an experience.”

Of Pirates—and really, this could apply to any Graney production—he says, “I know there will be people out there that want a more traditional version of the play. And there are theaters for those lovely people.”

 

Critic's Pick The Pirates - John Beer, TimeOut Chicago 12/30/10 - "At first glance, one might expect Richard D’Oyly Carte and associates to spin a bit in their graves at this gleefully irreverent staging of the 1879 operetta. The Pirate King (Robert McLean) appears tricked out as Hunter S. Thompson as Raoul Duke, and Mabel (Christine Stulik) and Frederic (Zeke Sulkes) open Frescas while awaiting a piratical attack. But the producer and his resident geniuses of topsy-turvy might well recognize that Graney and the Hypocrites share their taste for exuberant nonsense. With beach balls and sunglasses, this Pirates is a welcome blast of summer amid winter’s.   It’s a Wonderful Nutcracker lull.

The production employs Graney’s trademark promenade style: The audience is spread throughout the Chopin’s basement space, with action mostly focused on a central diagonal platform flanked by twin wading pools. A ten-person ensemble doubles as the orchestra, plucking out Kevin O’Donnell’s arrangement of Sullivan’s score on a curious array of instruments (guitar, mandolin, banjo, glockenspiel).

Musically, it’s not a show for purists; while Stulik displays a vibrant soprano, vocal impact and even tuning at times fall by the wayside in the piece’s mad onrush. Particularly in such full-cast numbers as “With Cat-Like Tread,” it might have been nice to have the support of a separate music section. But the production offers an exceptionally fun evening, featuring a literal showstopper by Matt Kahler. Truly the model of a modern Major-General, Kahler deploys Gilbert’s infectious patter with precision and diabolical wit.



 

 

 

 

 

 

 

From The Hypocrites - Sappy pirates, dewy-eyed damsels, bumbling bobbies and a stuffy Major General. Gilbert and Sullivan's hilarious, hopeful farce follows young Frederic, an orphan who has mistakenly been apprenticed to an ineffectual but raucous band of pirates. He disavows the pirates' way of life and falls for the beautiful Mabel. However, as Frederic was born on leap year, the Pirate King claims Frederic must remain an apprentice until his 21st birthday, when Frederic will be 84. Artistic Director Sean Graney brings his singular sense of humor to one of the most beloved operettas of all time.

Author
W.S. Gilbert, Arthur Sullivan

Director
Sean Graney

Performers
Zeke Sulkes, Christine Sulik, Matt Kahler, Robert McLean, Becky Poole, Emily Casey, Nikki Klix, Ryan Bourque, Doug Pawlik and Shawn Pfautsch

Production
New Arrangemetn - Kevin O'Donnell; Set Design - Tom Burch; Light Design - Jared Moore; Costume Design - Alison Siple; Choreography - Maureen Janson; Stage Management - Miranda Anderson

Tags: Theater, American, 2010