All Aboard for Pirates! The Penzance Musical: The Swashbuckling Saga of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Comic Operetta

Nearly 150 years ago, The Pirates of Penzance opened in New York, making it W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s only operetta to have its official premiere in America. Now, the show is back on Broadway in the form of Pirates! The Penzance Musical, running at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Todd Haimes Theatre.

Here’s a look at how The Pirates of Penzance came to be—and became Gilbert and Sullivan’s most enduring operetta.

FULL SAIL TO FAME

The librettist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan started writing The Pirates of Penzance in 1878.

By then, it was clear that H.M.S. Pinafore—the team’s fourth and most recent collaboration—was a hit in London, as well as a sensation in America. “Our greatest surprise is the success of Pinafore in America,” Sullivan told The New York Times in an 1879 interview. “It seemed to us that the subject was rather local than general.”

Gilbert, particularly, was eager to write a follow-up. He started drawing on his 1870 one-act, Our Island Home, which featured a pirate named Captain Bang who was mistakenly apprenticed to a pirate ship until his 21st birthday thanks to a dotty nursemaid.

The new operetta would follow Frederic, a dutiful 21-year-old orphan finishing his indenture to a band of pirates off the coast of England. Raised by the pirates and his nursemaid, Ruth, Frederic goes ashore to find a wife. There, he meets Major-General Stanley and his wards, including Mabel, who falls in love with him. When Frederic tries to start a new life with Mabel as a member of the police force, Ruth and the pirates come to shore, where zany antics and convoluted misunderstandings ensue, leading to a comic conclusion.

Pirates, nurses and mistaken instructions tend to crop up throughout Gilbert’s work, perhaps because, as he claimed, he had a nursemaid who briefly handed him over to pirates as a toddler. But in early drafts of the libretto, Gilbert wrote about a band of robbers, not pirates. So how did The Pirates of Penzance come to be about pirates? Well, it’s possible that Gilbert and Sullivan were preoccupied with thoughts of a different kind of piracy.

YOU WOULDN’T STEAL A SCORE

Gilbert and Sullivan’s choice to launch The Pirates of Penzance in New York arguably helped shape the city into the global capital of musical theater. At the time, however, it was motivated purely by legal strategy and financial self-interest.

By the time Gilbert and Sullivan traveled to New York to present H.M.S. Pinafore in 1879, there had already been an estimated 150 unlicensed productions of the show across the country. Since American copyright laws didn’t provide legal protection to foreigners at the time, many of those productions had taken massive liberties with the published material—and none had paid royalties.

Opening their next show in New York, however, would ensure Gilbert and Sullivan’s legal protection as authors for its subsequent American productions. To secure copyright in England, as well as in the United States, Gilbert and Sullivan had a touring company of H.M.S. Pinafore repurpose their costume pieces and sets for a one-night-only performance of The Pirates of Penzance in Devon, England, on December 30, 1879—the day before its New York opening—before the official London run a few months later.

FROM SHIPWRECK TO SHOWTIME

In October 1879, Gilbert and Sullivan came to New York with a proven hit, an almost-finished draft of a plausible second and a foolproof plan to profit from their work. But when Sullivan unpacked his bags in Manhattan, he couldn’t find his notes for the score of the first act of The Pirates of Penzance. He wrote to his mother: “It is a great nuisance, as I have to rewrite it all now and can’t recollect every number I did.”

In between rehearsals for the New York premiere of H.M.S. Pinafore, Sullivan reconstructed the music for the first act of The Pirates of Penzance, writing some from memory and the rest from scratch, in addition to the entirety of the second act. He kept working through Christmas and didn’t finish the score until December 28, mere days before opening night. According to Sullivan’s diary, he finished the overture at 5AM, the same morning he had to bring it to the orchestra.

“Went into the orchestra more dead than alive,” Sullivan wrote on opening night, “but got better when I took the stick in my hand. Fine reception. Piece went marvelously well. Grand success.”

The Pirates of Penzance opened at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre on December 31, 1879, to rave reviews. “The story is exceedingly droll, full of good points, odd rhymes, and irresistibly comical situations,” The New York Times wrote. “It would be impossible for a confirmed misanthrope to refrain from merriment over it.” Although that critic doubted that The Pirates of Penzance was different enough from H.M.S. Pinafore to be a hit in its own right, audiences proved him wrong. The New York production launched four touring companies while the London premiere, which opened on April 3, 1880, ran for nearly a year.

THE VERY MODEL OF A MODERN MAJOR MUSICAL

When reflecting on his success, Sullivan suspected that audiences loved The Pirates of Penzance because of its unique accessibility. “There is one thing, I fancy, in favor of these pieces—let us call them eccentric operas—they are in a new and original vein,” he told The New York Times in 1879, “works which may be performed before any audience.”

Gilbert and Sullivan’s novel blend of lush melody, highbrow wit and lowbrow humor catapulted The Pirates of Penzance into American popular entertainment. There, it mingled with the music, theater and comedy touring vaudeville circuits, which started popping up around America at roughly the same time.

Into the early 20th century, The Pirates of Penzance continued to grow in popularity, defining not only Gilbert and Sullivan’s legacy but the foundation of musical theater. Between 1900 and 1955, Gilbert and Sullivan’s operetta played 23 Broadway revivals, in addition to countless regional and amateur productions. It also seeped into popular culture, most notably via the often-parodied patter song, “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.”

Decades later, when American composers and lyricists like Richard Rodgers, Jerome Kern and Oscar Hammerstein II started to write book musicals, they were steeped in the tradition of Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic operettas. Even later, Stephen Sondheim took up Gilbert’s legacy of intricate and densely rhymed lyrics in patter songs like “Not Getting Married Today.” More recently, Lin-Manuel Miranda paid homage to The Pirates of Penzance in Hamilton with a direct quote from the Major-General’s song ("Now I'm the model of a modern major general,” declares George Washington)—and lyrics that, like Sondheim’s, follow in Gilbert’s footsteps.

RAISING THE JOLLY ROGER

As musical theater matured as an art form, Gilbert and Sullivan’s work receded from Broadway stages. From the 1950s onward, new musicals from contemporary writers took the place of regular revivals. But over the last few decades, as Gilbert and Sullivan’s work has entered the public domain, American directors have turned back to The Pirates of Penzance.

In 1980, director Joseph Papp staged The Pirates of Penzance in Central Park’s Delacorte Theater, adding synthesizers and electric guitars to the orchestrations. The production transferred to Broadway with Linda Ronstadt as Mabel and Kevin Kline as Major-General Stanley and ran for 787 performances, sparking a West End transfer and a 1983 film adaptation.

More recently, a 2001 adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance ran at New York’s South Street Seaport, featuring a slew of contemporary references and a performance by Martin Van Treuren as Major-General Stanley and, in drag, Ruth. In 2017, The Hypocrites, a Chicago-based theater company, staged the operetta at NYU Skirball with a pool and a tiki bar on stage.

BACK TO THE BRIG (AND BROADWAY)

Now, the nearly 150-year-old operetta is back on Broadway in the form of Pirates! The Penzance Musical, a New Orleans jazz and blues-infused take on the show running at Roundabout Theatre Company’s Todd Haimes Theatre. Directed by Scott Ellis, the production transplants the story to New Orleans, with new orchestrations by Joseph Joubert and Daryl Waters and a new book by Rupert Holmes. The cast includes Jinkx Monsoon as Ruth and David Hyde Pierce as Major-General Stanley (decades after hosting Saturday Night Live with a Gilbert and Sullivan parody as his opening monologue).

Despite the distance from French Quarter to the rocky coast of England, the revival’s setting harks back to Gilbert and Sullivan’s original copyright protection performances, one of which took place in New Orleans. “We want everyone to know," said Ellis in a statement, "that what you're going to see is a musical that celebrates the genius of Gilbert and Sullivan, while taking some joyous liberties.”