Stanford Savoyards - HMS Pinafore: The Next Generation

[calimac]

That's right, a production of G&S's HMS Pinafore with a ST:TNG theme. I don't attend the Stanford Savoyards, a student group with all the pitfalls of the breed, very often, but once I noticed a poster on campus for this, I couldn't resist. (And when I learned from the program book that I'd missed that last year they similarly did The Pirates of Penzance with a Firefly theme, I could have bit myself.)

So what exactly did they do? The set (the ship's bridge) and costumes were pure TNG, with Trek characters "cast" as the Pinafore ones in appropriate roles, often by performers physically resembling the Trek actors. (However, if your Geordi is pasty-white, you're just not trying.) For instance, the young lovers Josephine and Ralph were done as Counselor Troi and Commander Riker. (She: excellent. He: dreadful.) Dick Deadeye was Worf. I need hardly say who the Captain was. The most successful matchup, and the best acting performance in the show, was Sir Joseph Porter as Admiral Kirk. As the director's note observed, "The similarities in personality between the two made this an easy choice." Gerar Mazarakis, who played the part, had a witty and plausible knack for a parody of Shatneresque overacting. It made for a Sir Joseph utterly dissimilar in tone from any I'd ever seen before, but surprisingly effective.

The show was consequently packed with innumerable clever bits of stage business that any Trekfan would get a kick out of. For instance, Little Buttercup (Lwaxana Troi) was selling from her basket, among other things, tribbles (of course), and those tribbles made an unexpected reappearance in quantity later on in the show, of course.

The lyrics and dialogue, however, were almost totally untouched. No attempt was made to reframe this story of 19th century British class roles or to update the ancient nautical dialogue, or change the names, or address inevitable oddities resulting from the "casting," like Deanna being Picard's daughter.

Just a few changes were made, mostly in the spoken dialogue. Sir Joseph is beamed on board, yes, but from his barge (it's still a barge). There were just a couple minor, and one major, changes in lyrics. The major one was in "For He Is An Englishman":

For he might have been a Vulcan
A Trill, or Q, or Romulan
Or perhaps Cardassian

But in spite of all temptations to belong to other nations, he remains an Englishman, not a human or a citizen of the Federation or anything like that.

As a G&S production, it was basic for this group, which is sometimes better than this. Josephine (Christina Krawec: give her namecheck credit), as I mentioned, was excellent. Most were not, though there were a few honorable exceptions. Most impressive of the exceptions was a fine performance of the unaccompanied madrigal "A British tar." Just imagine watching it being done by Riker, Data, and Geordi LaForge.

Comments

[ookpik.livejournal.com]

Oh, I would have loved to see that! And I'm not even a Trekfan, though I've dated quite a few of them.

If you are ever in Philadelphia at an appropriate time, the Penn Law School Light Opera has done some surprisingly good G&S performances. My favorite was Patience (which I still want to see as SCAdian) where Bunthorne had broken his leg at the dress rehearsal, and instead of using his understudy they managed to adapt the physical bits. "Sing hey to you, good day to you" with Bunthorne popping wheelies in his wheelchair was...much, much better than I'd have expected.

[wild-patience.livejournal.com]

My favorite production of "Patience" was set in the late 1960s with a hippie theme. At the end, the hippie girls turn into little Tricia Nixon clones.

[spacecrab.livejournal.com]

Are you familiar with Karen Anderson's HMS Trek-a-Star, originally performed at the 1967 Westercon? I saw it and was also involved with a rival production at the same convention: "Captain Future Meets Gilbert and Sullivan or Alas! Who Loves A Spaceman?"

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

Yes, in fact I was mentioning that to B. and her sister, who was with us, and quoting the one line I remembered offhand, "Give 3.1416 cheers / To the science officer with pointed ears."

[19-crows.livejournal.com]

Somewhere in my files I have the program for that. My dad, a G&S fan, liked it a lot.

[(Anonymous)]

I'm not a big Star Trek fan, but I think I can imagine the production you've described. Resetting operas into periods and styles other than the original composer intended is an old and more-or-less honorable practice, of course. But generally, the goal of the production is to use the new look to make an informed comment on the message or theme of the opera as written. For instance, setting Rigoletto in an Italian-American mobster setting makes the obvious point that Renaissance treachery and vengeance, Italian-style, is hardly a thing of the past.

I'm at a loss to imagine what comment a classless and nationless science-fiction setting makes on H.M.S. Pinafore's themes of class barriers and British patriotism. Then there's the problem that the original work is itself a spoof of grand opera, and making a spoof of a spoof is extremely difficult to do in the best of circumstances. Your comments are mostly about the relative comic success of the production's "Trekkiness" - can you comment on the merits of the concept as art, so to speak?

Or am I taking Gilbert and Sullivan too seriously?

John Magoun

[kalimac.livejournal.com]

I actually tend to loathe the modern re-setting of serious opera and drama, something I see most often in Shakespeare. As a way of demonstrating the timelessness and contemporary relevance of the theme, it usually fails ludicrously, both because the play doesn't need the help and because, in anything more serious than pure farce (by which I'm including most of Shakespeare's comedies), all the updated setting does is generate a clash between itself and Shakespeare's language. The way to prove Shakespeare's themes relevant is to write your own play on the same theme, e.g. West Side Story. (Though even that will fail if you don't understand the play, e.g. the movie of A Thousand Acres.)

The only Shakespeare play that invariably benefits from manhandled setting is A Comedy of Errors, which frankly needs the help, as untouched its comedy is a little quaint today. And finding modern costuming cues to differentiate the Ephesians and the Syracusans also helps. But that is a farce. And so is most of Gilbert and Sullivan, some of whose comedy has also gotten a little out of our reach.

The only G&S play that could benefit from the kind of help that recostuming does for A Comedy of Errors is Patience, whose aesthetes and denouement "commonplaces" look rather alike to us today. Accordingly I was delighted by a production that set it in the 1960s (but with no alteration of the text, as I recall), with hippies changing to what we'd now call the "Mad Men" look. That really did clarify Gilbert's meaning to modern eyes.

But Patience is a farce, and consequently sturdy enough to take such treatment. So is Pinafore. The only relevance it has to Star Trek is that they're both shipboard naval stories. The rest is purely the fun of finding such other parallels as you can. Essentially it's best taken - without consciously insisting on this with any intensity - as if the crew of the Enterprise decided to put on the show and parody themselves. And that puts the conceit of this production squarely in the tradition of TNG's own holodeck episodes, which were an opportunity for the screenwriters to do exactly the same thing.