Cover image: Sir Joseph Porter (Jeff Church) arrives aboard ship with his dog, Blanca, in Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s production of HMS Pinafore. (Photo: Catherine Weatbrook)
Every year for the past 63 years the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society has presented one of the inimitable canon of works composed and written by the 19th-century duo of Arthur Sullivan and William S Gilbert, two men who frequently got across each other but who together could create works of a quality which neither could achieve alone.
With a light touch and a great deal of humor, the two men skewered many of the accepted shibboleths of 19th-century British culture, some of which are surprisingly still current in today’s society on both sides of the Atlantic. In this year’s offering by Seattle G & S, HMS Pinafore, we are treated to the absurdities of class barriers and the ability to climb high as a politician in a profession without actually knowing anything valuable about it.
This production, running through July 30 at Cornish Playhouse, has many of the perennially excellent attributes of the organization, though some exaggerations in the staging don’t sit well for this G & S devotee.
Josephine (Jessica Noronha), and Rafe Rackstraw (Alex Gallo), celebrate their love for each other while Cousin Hebe (Megan Callahan McCormick) and the Bosn’s Mate, far left (Dima Pogrebniak) share their joy for a happy ending aboard HMS Pinafore. (Photo: Catherine Weatbrook)
It is such a pleasure to be able to hear the words of the songs (crucial to the work). Most of the soloists and the chorus had extraordinarily clear diction and the Society has always worked on English pronunciation, even some dialect. Only the two women soloists, Jessica Noronha as the Captain’s daughter Josephine, and Bianca Raso as the bumboat* woman, Little Buttercup, were hard to understand.
Little Buttercup (Bianca Raso) dances around the mysterious secrets she holds with Captain Corcoran (John Carroll) in Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society’s production of HMS Pinafore. (Photo: Catherine Weatbrook)
Seattle G & S has always been able to field good voices and this year is no exception. It’s always good to see new faces and new voices coming to the fore. Many members of the Society are not only singers but as well do everything backstage from set designers, builders, painters and costumers to marketing, and many have grown old in their enjoyment of this genre. So while there are still such voices as Gary Webberley, in this year’s chorus, a continuous performer for 52 years with the group, and William J. Darkow who has sung nearly every role for baritone in the entire G & S thirteen operas more than once (this time Dick Deadeye the snitch), there are newcomers like Noronha, Alex Gallo as Ralph Rackstraw, the hapless sailor who loves the Captain’s daughter, John Carroll as Captain Corcoran, Jeff Church as Sir Joseph Porter, the full-of-himself First Lord of the Admiralty, who ably encompassed the essential patter song, and Raso, who joined in the last couple of years.
The set by Nathan Rodda is faithful to the original illustrations, a practical one for lively movement on stage, while the ladies’ costumes have freshness and charm, but the sailors’ attire for a formal visit is a disgrace to the navy. And the captain of a British ship has four stripes on his sleeve. This captain had only three.
Sir Joseph Porter (Jeff Church) tells his sisters, cousins & aunts and Little Buttercup (Bianca Raso) that if they want to rise to the top of the nautical tree, his advice is to never go to sea. (Photo: Catherine Weatbrook)
While the staging, by newcomer to G & S choreographer and director Philip Lacey, is mostly faithful to the traditions that have been passed down over the decades, much of it in this product seemed more than a bit overblown. While Sir Joseph is always seen to be finicky and fussy, here he was portrayed as so effeminate as to be a caricature, though the miniature poodle he carried was a nice touch. There was a little too much familiarity between the sailors and the Captain, and certainly too much between the sailors and Sir Joseph’s retinue of sisters, cousins, and aunts, who would hardly have danced hornpipes with them. It didn’t feel as though Lacey was deeply familiar yet with this particularly genre of comic operas, where a little restraint can be funnier than lay-it-on-with-a-trowel comedy, and much more British.
Sir Joseph and Bianca (Photo: Catherine Weatbrook)
Buttercup is usually intended to be a plump, older person but the contralto voice she needs is often a difficult one to find. Here the mezzo voice chosen belonged to a petite, young woman of clearly exotic origin by British naval standards of the day. It was clever to emphasize her as Italian both by her dress (which might have appeared to be more Spanish but hardly what you’d expect on a bumboat woman) and the tiny flag she waves when everyone else is waving a Union Jack.
Conducted by Bernard Kwiram, who for the sixteenth year led the orchestra, the musical pacing was excellent, the balance right, the orchestra lively and together.
(*A bumboat is a small boat used to ferry supplies to and from ships.)
Dear Ms. Kiraly, Thank you for your presence and thoughtful review of 2017’s HMS Pinafore. In fact, captain’s stripes (on sleeves) in the Royal Navy numbered 3 from most of 1856 to April of 1861. Before, there was no clarity on stripes, and afterward up through the present day, as you state, they number four. Perhaps the Society’s costumes are a few decades off–but no more than that!!
It’s funny that the Royal Navy exclusively used shoulder insignia to distinguish rank prior to 1856, and when stripes were integrated, THREE stripes meant “Captain.” Only later in the century was it adjusted to FOUR. So such attention to costume detail is almost as fussy as the Lord Admiral’s fixation on reading exactly from scripts.