• Gilbert & Sullivan & The Public Domain

    Date: 2011.10.15 | Category: Theater | Tags:

    I was ready to bring down the full weight of my disapproval on the Guthrie Theatre’s staging of Gilbert & Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore,” which aired on PBS last night. “It’s a good thing that W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan have both been dead for 100 years,” I ranted, “because director Joe Dowling’s ‘updated’ production of ‘Pinafore’ is tantamount to murder.”

    Then I remembered the production of “Little Shop of Horrors” that I saw (and very much enjoyed) last summer at San Francisco’s Boxcar Theatre. It was shut down by the licensing organization that owns the rights, because director Nick Olivero adapted the musical’s script, adding material from the two film versions and one tune from “The Rocky Horror Show.” Olivero lamented the fact that due to copyright, artists cannot feel free to adapt others’ creations into new, original work. “If ‘we’ can collectively agree that William Shakespeare was the greatest playwright of all time,” wrote Olivero, “yet every producer, director, actor, and playwright deems it appropriate to cut and revise his work, then who is to say that any other writer shouldn’t be edited as well?”

    And that’s true — Shakespeare’s canon has been remixed ad nauseam, simply because he had the misfortune to die back in the 1600s, centuries before the folks at Disney (who, incidentally, have benefited greatly from public domain work) decreed that copyright must now last a zillion years so that no one can make their own Mickey Mouse cartoons. “Little Shop” has become  a ubiquitous community and high school theater favorite and I understand why Olivero would want to shake it up a little bit. So I’m not going to say that Joe Dowling shouldn’t have created his own modernized version of “H.M.S. Pinafore.” I’m just going to say that I didn’t care for it, and I don’t think that Gilbert & Sullivan would have, either.

    According to the Wikipedia entry on Gilbert & Sullivan (sourced from William Cox-Ife’s book W. S. Gilbert: Stage Director), “Gilbert oversaw the designs of sets and costumes, and he directed the performers on stage. He sought realism in acting, shunned self-conscious interaction with the audience, and insisted on a standard of characterisation where the characters were never aware of their own absurdity. Gilbert insisted that his actors know their words perfectly and obey his stage directions, which was something new to many actors of the day. Sullivan personally oversaw the musical preparation. The result was a new crispness and polish in the English musical theatre.”

    In other words, G&S were kind of control freaks. Which was understandable, given their problems with unauthorized productions of their works (there were no international copyright laws back then). I think they would have been horrified by having their music adapted to sound more “contemporary,” with pop and Latin beats, and especially by the addition of a new character (Queen Victoria) who comes in toward the end and knights Dick Deadeye because it turned out that she had an affair with him years ago. Even the most audacious Shakespeare remixers don’t invent new characters and then deign to write new dialogue for them. I’m not even going to mention the penis jokes.

    Because “H.M.S. Pinafore” is a fairly ambitious play to stage — it requires a cast of immensely talented singers with operatic voices — it’s not something you can see every day. I have been lucky enough to see it twice, most recently in August, in the Lamplighters‘ exquisitely faithful production. It saddens me to think that for most people, the Guthrie production is the first and perhaps only “Pinafore” they’ll ever encounter. I’ve seen with my own eyes, over and over again, audiences of all ages delighted by traditional, unadorned performances of Gilbert & Sullivan. You don’t need to turn “He Is An Englishman” into a five-minute-long tap number that climaxes with Ralph Rakestraw dropping trou to reveal a set of Union Jack boxers.

    And yet, the show is in public domain, so anyone can have their way with it — there was a Yiddish version a few years ago, and a gay version (“Pinafore!”, in which “the captain’s son is a transvestite who has successfully convinced his supposedly straight lover that he is a she.”). But just because it’s legally OK doesn’t mean I have to like it. To quote Queen Victoria: “We are not amused.”