Coast of Cornwall hosts zany doings as Buck Creek presents 'The Pirates of Penzance'

Choosing from the summit of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan's operetta achievement to start Buck Creek Players' 53rd season also confirmed the company president's personal history with "The Pirates of Penzance."

Georgeanna Teipen's curtain speech Friday night set the tone for what she said was her aim in placing the work first in 2026-27 at the troupe's home on the far-southeastern side of Indianapolis.

Mabel and Frederic sing of their bond, achieved with difficulty.

The ensemble riches set forth in Gilbert's book and lyrics, complemented in permanent fashion by Sullivan's music, work hand-in-glove with  the broadly outlined individual vividness presented in such characters as the lovers Frederic and Mabel, the Pirate King, Major-General Stanley, the nurse Ruth, and such memorable minor characters as the Police Sergeant, who in due course reminds us that "a policeman's lot is not a happy one."

The forces of law and order, and of outlaw and disorder, involve themselves in ridiculously outlined conflicts. The allure of finding love in a society the show's creators saw under a comical aspect had a host of proprieties we no longer recognize as operative. "The Pirates of Penzance" fortunately cannot be modernized, though you might look in vain for a true picture of the Victorian age there. It is a rare person of conscience today who would identify as "the slave of duty," as the operetta's subtitle has it.

That description applies to Frederic, raised as pirate through the mistake of his nurse (Ruth), who had been charged to apprentice him to a pilot. He thus sees his devotion to piracy as an ironclad charge until he reaches his majority, which is about to happen, he supposes.

Though newcomers to the show will not be confused for long, the complexity appears to be a Gordian knot, which only the Gilbertian wit can slice through, as it dependably does in the finale. The demands of love are satisfied too in the eventual promised union of Frederic and Mabel, the boldest of a bevy of sisters in ward to the puffed-up Major-General, whose comeuppance is his own distress about having misrepresented his identity.

A climactic moment in "The Pirates of Penzance" with all complexities about to be resolved.

Teipen has her cast fully up to the task of caricature, including a range of emotions that only appear to be deep-seated. The acting must proceed as if serious matters are always foremost, and the singing — to the deft, sometimes strident, accompaniment of a pit band consisting of winds dominated by musical director Gabe Harlan's synthesizer —had to follow suit. With such instrumentation, it made sense for this production to abandon the overture. 

Moments of passionate delicacy are rare, but in this show are convincingly carried out, as was the love duet "Stay, Frederic, Stay," performed by Shederick Whipple and Devyn Kerr in the second act. They were topnotch examples of the lyric tenor and coloratura soprano required for the roles of Frederic and Mabel. Nearly all the singing had what was needed in terms of brio and blend, somewhat compromised by the unevenness of face-mic amplification. 

Choral ensembles jelled with admirable consistency. The hymnlike vigor of the first-act finale hailing "Poetry,  thou heaven-born maid" served as a fervent reminder that Sullivan was notable in serious music (a broad swath of Christianity used to be grateful for his "Onward, Christian Soldiers"). The virginal young women blended well, even managing the fluty chatter of "How beautifully blue the sky" when it's climactically set against the two lovers' outpouring in a different meter. 

Looking their parts (thanks to some attentive wig and costume design) and sounding idiomatic were Casey Adams as the Pirate King, Scott Fleshood as the Police Sergeant, Derek Sumpter as Samuel the pirate, and especially Daniel Draves as the Major-General. Draves stood out perhaps too conspicuously as the only member of the cast with a passable English accent, including a plausible way of rolling his r's. That could be taken as a personalized character trait more feasible in isolation than it would have been to engage a dialect coach to make everyone sound authentic. And it added a frisson of extra gusto to his performance, even if he did drop a word or two in the patter-song masterpiece, "I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General."

That song has top ear-worm status among the show's treasures, though  few of us can even begin to get more than scraps of the lyrics in place. Forget the mental tongue-twister of it all. The best solution is just to go see this show, which runs through Sept. 6. 

[Photos: Indy Ghost Light]