Did you just walk out of The Pirates of Penzance?

Last night, my keen sense of duty overcame any general lack of enthusiasm for musical theater that I may occasionally express, and I went (with catlike tread) to see the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players perform The Pirates of Penzance at Wolf Trap. It was quite fun to see it performed live with great gusto, good humor, strong voices, and a few updated jokes for the DC crowd. According to my thoroughly unscientific survey of the crowd on the lawn, there was at least one large group of people in full pirate dress and several spectators sporting pirate hats and skull-and-crossbones head scarves, which, in addition to to full house, indicates pirates are as popular as they were in 1879.

David Cordingly, author of Under the Black Flag: The Romance and the Reality of Life Among the Pirates, notes that the operetta is a deliberate parody of Victorian-era melodramas featuring pirates as villains who terrorize the sea and discusses Penzance's influential role in shaping contemporary images of pirates:

The story is sheer nonsense and revolves around the mistake made by Ruth, "a pirate maid of all work," when she apprentices Frederick [sic], the hero, to a pirate instead of a pilot. The pirates themselves are as genial and ineffective as the policemen who are sent to catch them, but a complicated plot ends happily with Frederick marrying the Major-General's pretty daughter, Mabel, and the pirates revealed as patriotic noblemen who will no more go a-pirating. In spite of its lighthearted approach to the subject, The Pirates of Penzance has had a considerable influence on the way many people view pirates today. For more than a hundred years it has been performed by amateur and professional companies around the world, and its cast of hearty and good-natured fellows have contributed to the illusion that pirates were really misunderstood ruffians who never meant to harm anyone. (25)

Whether because of its piratical theme or the influential (and G-rated) wit of Gilbert and Sullivan, The Pirates of Penzance has clearly endured better than the melodramas it set out to parody; The West Wing, for example, would not have had much luck working The Red Rover, or The Mutiny of the Dolphin (which was immensely popular in 1829, though described by one critic as "arrant trash") into its scripting, though it had no such trouble with Gilbert and Sullivan's works in "And it's surely to their credit."


And, given its longevity and silliness, it is perhaps unsurprising that The Pirates of Penzance has itself become the object of parody (and subject to the same confusion with H.M.S. Pinafore -- "they're all about duty") by none other than the Animaniacs in "H.M.S. Yakko."