“Oh Frederic, can you not in the calm excellence of your wisdom reconcile it with your conscience to say something that will easy my father’s sorrow?”
“…What?”
“Can’t you cheer him up?”
– The Pirates of Penzance

Without doubt, one of the best things about working for a university with several renowned performing arts programs and groups, and the talent they manage to attract – is coupling all that with the sweet staff and faculty discount I get on tickets. I’ve seen at least one opera or musical and play every year I’ve lived here (The Magic Flute was painfully mediocre – although the witch trio was amazing, Die Fledermaus was one of my favorite comic performances ever, The Phantom of the Opera could have been mistaken for a Broadway or West End performance, Love’s Labour’s Lost – set in WWII France – was brilliant).
Today I bought my last tickets as a staff member: a summer performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance (the movie version of which starring Kevin Kline and so delightfully, purposefully camp was a childhood favorite). It felt bittersweet tucking my last discounted ticket envelope into my bag.
Then I got an email about next year’s lineup for touring performers. John Lithgow, Audra McDonald, and Joshua Bell. As well as a Middle Eastern group performing an adaptation of Hamlet in Farsi, a marionette troupe, and some really great looking Shakespeare.
Bittersweet to just bitter, alas!
…But then I think about how I can go to performances at The Globe and in the West End…and I’m mollified.
Kevin Kline! I do love Pirates of Penzance – I think I like Pinafore more overall, but the Sergeant is one of my favourite second-tier G&S characters and oh oh oh I can’t choose.
Anyway, don’t worry, there’s loads of G&S here! 😀 Over Christmas we saw a great all-male production of Pirates (http://www.piratesisback.com/), and I remember a fantastic camp late-night BDSM version of Pinafore above a pub a few years ago.
Those sound magnificent. Christmas plans, ho! And I share your love for the Sergeant! I’ve always preferred Pirates to Pinafore, but that’s probably due entirely to my childhood favoritism, of which I do not repent.
Although, now I’m taking some of the lyrics in totally different ways (When the Foeman Bears His Steel has now become quite a bit more raunchy in my head thanks to you…;)