WILMINGTON, NC – Before the curtain went up on the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players‘ production of H.M.S. Pinafore, the audience was informed that Thalian Hall had a long history with Gilbert & Sullivan – the venue played host to a production of Trial by Jury back in 1881, one hundred and forty-four years ago.

I wonder what W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan would make of their work in 2025. I wonder if they expected that H.M.S. Pinafore would still be regularly performed over a hundred years after they debuted it. I further wonder how they would feel about the way their work is understood in a popular context.

In America, specifically in the pop culture landscape, Gilbert & Sullivan is often used as a sloppy signifier of pomposity. If we see a character listening to (or especially singing) Gilbert & Sullivan in a show like Family Guy or The Simpsons, we are meant to understand that that character is arrogant or pretentious. I could write an entire essay about how this came about, but it puts any Gilbert & Sullivan productions at a disadvantage. Essentially, a company has to reintroduce G & S to audiences that think they know what to expect, similar to how a production of any of Shakespeare’s comedies has to overcome the perception of Shakespeare as stuffy or fancy to remind viewers that this is, in fact, a comedy.

Thankfully, the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players have such a contagious love of the material, and understand it on such a familiar level, that they find ways to delightfully reintroduce Gilbert & Sullivan to even a lifelong fan like myself.

In a piece I wrote about the film adaptation of The Pirates of Penzance, I described the process of staging period comedy as “understanding the timeless aspects of the comedy and allowing the rest of the production to grow out from there.” It’s a principle that I only believe more strongly as time goes on, and I think it’s the key to getting Gilbert & Sullivan right. Gilbert was a genius satirist, and every one of his collaborations with Sullivan present absurdly convoluted scenarios, resulting from either Victorian society or tropes in Victorian fiction. By mercilessly undermining both, Gilbert continuously strips them of any credibility and will often end with a plot twist so out of left field that it would effectively torpedo any internal logic left. All this while still allowing the characters to have dreams and personalities, so that the conflicts and the stakes at least feel real to them.

Using H.M.S. Pinafore as an example, the opera is a forbidden romance story where a captain’s daughter and a simple sailor pine for each other but are separated by class. This sort of melodrama would be quite common with no hint of irony during the period, and Gilbert clearly thinks the whole thing is really stupid. Almost as stupid as he thinks the British class system is, with both being targets throughout the play. At the same time, the love between Josephine and Ralph Rackstraw and the angst at their separation isn’t undermined. It’s a delicate balancing act, but it provides a lot of potential for any production of H.M.S. Pinafore.

The test I use is whether the audience and the production are synchronized, so that the audience isn’t laughing at the drama and quiet during the comedy.

I will not sell the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players short by simply saying they passed the test – the players had a masterful command of the audience. Thalian was packed near to capacity and thus it would have been easy for a misplaced laugh to spread, but there were no stray laughs.

In order to effectively discuss the third standout performance of the night, I need to revisit the idea of reintroducing the material to the audience, and how it specifically applied here.

Even to their most devoted of fans, Gilbert & Sullivan are known more for the strength of their eccentric supporting characters than the leads. There are exceptions, but in The Pirates of Penzance, for example, Frederic and Mabel are not as memorable as The Pirate King or Major General Stanley. H.M.S. Pinafore is the same, traditionally, but this particular production did something really smart with the character of Josephine. Michelle Seipel played Josephine as larger than life – big enough to highlight her strengths as a comedienne and make me realize that Josephine is a more vibrant character than I had previously thought. She’s kind of the protagonist, with Ralph Rackstraw as her love interest, so she gets a lot of songs and numerous asides to the audience, and has a little more agency in the events as they unfold. It’s a smart way to make the material fresh to people who were already quite familiar with it.

Cameron Smith as Rackstraw

Speaking of Rackstraw, Cameron Smith’s performance brings that elusive “golden retriever energy” to the role in a way that makes Josephine’s attraction make complete sense. Angela Christine Smith similarly grounds Buttercup, the love interest for Captain Corcoran, as a genuinely warm stage presence who commands as much affection from the audience as the other characters. I also must give credit to Matthew Wages‘ performance as Dick Deadeye. Deadeye is a difficult character, as he is one of the rare Gilbert & Sullivan villains (as opposed to victims of circumstance) and it’s up to the actor handling him to find the weird anti-charm that endears him to the audience.

It’s rare that when I get to praise the ensemble cast of a production like this, I also get to include the orchestra in that, by which I mean that the orchestra (especially Albert Bergeret, orchestra conductor and director of the production) are as much characters in the production as the actors. Some of the biggest laughs were when the characters got in brief fourth wall-breaking spats with the orchestra.

All of these pieces came together for the central comic set piece of the production: “Nevermind the Why and Wherefore,” the trio number between Captain Corcoran, Sir Joseph Porter, and Josephine. This song on a baseline is hilarious with dramatic irony, witty lyrics, and energetic musicality. But Bergeret and his mad collaborators turned it into a bit of a drinking song. with the character doing a series of toasts while getting increasingly drunk. There was an extended bit where they get stuck doing the last verse over and over again (until the captain had to threaten the orchestra to stop) and it masterfully segued into an extended comic bit between Captain Corcoran and Sir Joseph Porter. This was the sequence where the audience was laughing the hardest and that got the biggest applause.

If you hear that the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players are bringing a production to your town, I urge you to catch it. The company understands what has allowed a catalogue of Victorian light operas to remain within the popular consciousness, and the life they breathed into H.M.S. Pinafore made for one of the best productions I’ve enjoyed at Thalian Hall.