OPERA REVIEW : D’Oyly Carte Mines ‘Pirates’ Treasure in Orange County

Poor wandering ones! Though ye have surely strayed, Take heart of grace. Your steps retrace, Poor wandering ones . . . . In the distant past, the D’Oyly Carte wanderers may indeed have strayed. In their new incarnation, however, they seem at last to have found true peace of mind. And more.

On Tuesday, our nomadic visitors presented a conservative perspective of “The Mikado” at the Orange County Performing Arts Center. Although the performance offered no revelations, it did score the basic points with welcome taste and useful charm.

Then, on Friday, came “The Pirates of Penzance.” Ah, rapture.

Caution was thrown to the loving breeze. There could be no sighing softly with this rollicking band.

Staged by Keith Warner, designed by Marie Jeanne Lecca and choreographed by Anthony van Laast, this is the very model of a major modern production. It brims with zany wit and bold imagination.

It dares to be silly and self-satirical. In the process, it invokes the manners of Monty Python--outrageously, wondrously daft manners that probably can trace their gnarled roots to the old Savoy Theater anyway.

This veddy British incarnation of “Pirates” has style. It ignores literal convention, but--a crucial but --it never tramples the spirit of Gilbert’s inspired words or the letter of Sullivan’s elegant music.

What, never? Well, hardly ever.

One couldn’t say as much for the recent Broadway revival that cast pop stars as the lyrical lovers and reorchestrated the music for a band of amplified harmonicas and electronic kazoos. That version was similarly bizarre, and alarmingly popular, but it took liberties even with its liberties.

The indulgences allowed here are delicately cheeky and deliriously apt. Warner--a director from the English National Opera, whose biography is conspicuously absent from the program magazine--has concocted a gaggle of gags that make particularly good nonsense within Lecca’s surrealist cartoon sets.

The stationary scenery, portable props and flying flats defy such mundane considerations as temporal and spatial specificity. More important, they allow characters to pop out of doors in the ocean, peer through windows in the sky or climb walls that masquerade as an innocent landscape.

“Pour, oh, pour the pirate sherry,” sing the gentlemen of Penzance as the curtain rises.

You want to know who they are? They are members of a sea-unworthy country club.

Two tail-coated butlers pour the sherry. A couple of cutthroats mime a badminton game. Other macho fellows practice pirouettes. Their leader, a devastatingly debonair baritone, sports a frilly white shirt, the right sleeve of which envelopes a well manicured hook.

The ever-crisp Major-General is a splendidly decaying officer with a permanent twinkle in his monocle and a penchant for pathetic bravado. When prey to insomnia, he stalks the boards clutching a trusty Teddy Bear.

His 16 delightful daughters make their usual dainty entrance climbing over rocky mountain, skipping rivulet and fountain. Here, however, each chorine carries her own Styrofoam boulder. Later, as they urge the timid constabulary heroes on to battle, the girls wave unison pompons worthy of Dallas Cowboy cheerleaders.

The adorable constabulary heroes resemble booming Keystone Kops who jerk on wires. Their lot is particularly happy when they can growl delicately into their teacups to imitate the little brook a-gurgling.

When the ensemble pauses for its a-capella apostrophe to the sacred muse, portraits of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan suddenly materialize on the backdrop to hail poetry. When the police charge the pirates to yield in Queen Victoria’s name, the stern monarch makes a special guest appearance herself, just in the nick of time. Eventually, she waltzes off with the Major-General as the curtain falls.

It is ridiculous. It is lovely.

The perfectly disciplined cast savors every quaver and every quiver. Eric Roberts--the comedian in residence--prances, leers, chirps and croons with wily abandon as the pattering paterfamilias. Malcolm Rivers, remembered as an unusually forceful Alberich in the Seattle “Ring,” is admirably dapper and sonorous as the Pirate King.

David Fieldsend exudes wide-eyed quasi-innocence as the would-be heroic Frederic. Marilyn Hill Smith manages to be both saucy and sweet as Mabel, the arch-ingenue prone to chronic coloratura.

Susan Gorton makes Ruth, the piratical maid-of-all-work, a mellifluous and amiable fusion of Tugboat Annie, Mae West and Quasimodo. As the Sergeant of Police, Rohn Rath slaps his chest and sings with befuddled basso bonhomie.

John Pryce-Jones treats Sullivan--and Gilbert too--with tender, loving, propulsive care in the modestly staffed pit.

Oh, yes. Ah, yes. This is exceeding gladness.