- This play is very much as a send-up of late Victorian society and it's I don't want to say it's a spoof it's not that
but it's very witty, very sort of high comedy, but it's also very campy in many ways.
[singing]
- They call Gilbert and Sullivan the fathers, the progenitors of the musical comedy, and in fact they are.
They really took music hall and they and panto and other sort of lower-class traditions
and they published them up and made them okay for the middle class
Okay but you're now king of this, I bet you can stand on it 'I'm King now' and you stand by them you're his deputy.
And what they're doing is they're using those traditions Gilbert and Sullivan are using those traditions
and turning a lot of it on its head as a means of poking fun of the proprieties of late Victorian society.
[singing]
We've been talking about doing a musical for a long long time um and we don't very often.
It's hard to coordinate, it's a big investment of our time and energy.
[singing]
It draws on so many sources that we don't ordinarily do that it just seemed like real picnic.
So we can draw in our singer actors, we can involve our we have a choreographer
who's an MFA in dance, Stephanie Simpson, we can draw on incredible talents in terms of building the set.
- I basically want to just create these grand settings
you know for the music to kind of take place and so that you kind of have all of this beautiful music
and you have the surround to look at as well.
For this particular world like I want it to have a lot of color kind of like a watercolory kind of look to it
so that it's also colorful and fun at the same time.
[singing]
- I'm working with the choreographer, i'm working with Ellen
and we're deciding together sort of on tempos how fast or slow it works
for the dances, for the music, for instrumentally how fast it works.
[singing]
- So I was really excited to have the opportunity to work with Ellen in the theater department on this production
to kind of get to know her and the kids here on a different way as opposed to just teaching classes
and working with them on my individual projects.
Something that I personally as an artist in musical theatre is I want the dance to continue the story along
and so part of that is also just embodying the movement
which has been great that we could get to that level so quickly with this group.
- We've never done this period of about the 1870s before,
so they're corseted and bustled and petty coated in all the different layers,
all of the dresses are built from scratch which means researching the patterns,
and then there are the hats to build and the parasols and the trimmings and the gloves and the handkerchiefs
so it's a lot of accessories that's just for the girls never mind the Pirates and the Police.
-The girls have been rehearsing in their skirts for like three weeks now
so there won't be any sort of like oh my god I can't do this
like I can't sit down and we did actually have to work on that at rehearsal one day
was how to properly sit down on the guys knee, the Pirates, with your big bustle.
- How you sit down on a rock with an enormous metal cage on your butt is a challenge
and but you know generations of young ladies did it in the 1870s so I think these actors can.
[music]
- What really drives this is aesthetic.
it is exquisitely created the music and the marriage of music and libretto is extraordinarily beautiful.
- The lyrics are definitely helpful in a show like this because a lot of it is funny gestures
based off the lyrics or puns that are in there
and you want to accentuate that within the movement and the choreography
so its like playing off of that sort of comedic timing and words and movement and all that sort of stuff.
The characters can take a lot of liberties they can put a lot of humor and a lot of their own character
into the music and with those liberties they can just musically add humor to it.
It's a very playful score.
[singing]
The underlying structure of the play is that you have these anarchic pirates, you have the boy Frederick,
the hero, who is looking to leave that behind
is torn by this double sense of duty responsibility to the Pirates and to his love.
- You know if you look at it's the classic boy wants girl, boy loses girl, boy gets girl,
the father figure as always stands in the way, the father's lie in this case prevents the marriage,
it is redeemed and the Pirates are revealed to be the upper level, the Peters noble men that they are.
- You have the daughters, you have the Pirates and you have the police, and you have these three distinct groups
and you being there all kind of working together and with most musicals all happy.