"It’s easy, in elegant diction, to call it an innocent
fiction."
One of the true saving graces of these silly operas is that 90% of the
plot takes place decades before the curtain goes up. So we only
have to sit through a sort of "Cliff’s Notes" version of the
story. Pirates is no exception. The tale starts when
Fred (he’s the so-called "hero") is eight years old and his
father decides that he should learn a trade. So Dad sends him off
with the nursery maid to get him signed up as an apprentice pilot so that he
can learn the trade of sea-faring.
Now, before we get into the inevitable plot complications, let us note
with some relief that in this opera, at least, we will not have to worry
about those tongue-numbing names, like "Brunhilde" or "Siegfried,"
that you find in other operas. We can do quite nicely with "Fred"
and "Mabel," thank you.
Actually, Fred’s full name is "Frederic," much to the
consternation of my spelling checker. Frederic, as we will soon
learn, has an IQ that is numerically about equal to room temperature
(Fahrenheit, Celsius — it’s only a matter of degree,) and he has the
same moral convictions as a weather vane. It has to do with which
way the wind is blowing.
Our first task as an audience is to accept the notion that Fred was
inadvertently apprenticed to a pirate (instead of a pilot)
because his nurse was a touch hard of hearing. Old Fred, of
course, saw nothing unusual about this (nor, apparently, did his family whom
we never hear of again) until his apprenticeship was due to be over on his
21st birthday.
Having been at sea since he was eight, our strapping 21-year-old can’t
remember what a woman (other than deaf old Ruth who’s going on 47!) looks
like. Ruth decided to stay on as an administrative assistant with
the pirates after her little boo-boo. The salt air and clean
living evidently have cleared up her deafness and she’s now driving the
pirates nuts.
Now, it seems that Fred was born on the 29th of February in
1856. (This bit of trivia becomes important later, so pay
attention!) We can assume that his apprenticeship contract expired at
midnight (very common — look at your auto insurance policy). Based upon a
comment, made during the birthday celebration, by the Pirate King ("It’s
only half-past eleven, and you are one of us until the clock strikes
twelve,") what we have here are a bunch of drunk pirates carousing
on the beach in the middle of the night, at the coldest time of the year,
drinking sherry. (Talk about hating yourself in the morning!)
Shortly after this piratical party of the first part, along comes a bevy
of beautiful girls on a picnic with the intention of "paddling" in
the water. For the sake of rational thinking, we had best assume
that the paddling bit actually happens the next day, which must have been
unseasonably warm even for England, in (what would now be) early
March. ("How beautifully blue the sky. . . and yet it rained but
yesterday")
Giving Gilbert the benefit of the doubt, I suppose we could assume that
Fred’s contract expired at 12 noon instead of midnight, thereby allowing
the girls to climb over the Rocky Mountains (listen — it’s in the song!)
later that same day. This take would seem to indicate that our pirates are
hitting the sherry before noon — before the sun was over the yardarm, as
it were — highly un-seamanlike, even for pirates.
In either scenario, we are all "paddling" in chilly water!
If the above discussion already within your brain doth gyrate, I had
better not tell you about the girls’ foster-father, a high-ranking British
military officer, whose daughters, coincidentally, number precisely the same
as the pirates (all "single
gentlemen,") and who makes difficult rhymes about most of the
subjects you hated in high school.
In order to save his daughters (not to mention himself) from the pirates,
he claims he’s an orphan. This leads directly into a song about
the poetry of a product called "Divine Skin Softener" (look it
up), and later causes deep concern on the part of the General regarding
avoidance of stains on the escutcheon of the ancestors that he has recently
purchased.
Later we can discuss the business about Frederic being born on February
29th in leap year and not reaching his 21st birthday (in the contractual
sense) until 1940 (actually 1944, since Gilbert forgot that 1900 was not a
leap year. It’s that millennium bug again!), thus requiring him
to switch loyalties back to his former colleagues after promising to lead
the Keystone Cops in an effort to capture the slippery rascals.
And, of course, the Keystone Cops have a rooted antipathy toward being
the agents whereby their erring fellow-creatures are deprived of that
liberty which is so dear to all. But, of course, they should have
thought of that before they joined the Force. Now all they can do
is slap their chests and sing.
If you have accepted all of this, then it will certainly come as no
surprise that the pirates, in addition to being orphans, are the sons of
British Peers (Those dumdums from Iolanthe
again!), and are deeply patriotic and sort of devoted to Queen
Victoria. What else is a Major-General to do after all of these
developments come to light, than to utter the immortal words: "take my daughters,
all of whom are beauties."
At this juncture, the sopranos pair up with the tenors, the altos with
the baritones, the contraltos with the bases, the double-belled euphoniums
with the fluegel horns, etc., and once again, all is right with the
English-speaking world.
--Mike (he's telling a terrible) Storie
,
2006