Ten Unusual Manifestations of Gilbert & Sullivan

1. Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Writer/producer Aaron Sorkin is an unapologetic diehard who regularly drops Gilbert & Sullivan quotes into the dialogue he writes. He’s used “I’m never ever sick at sea as a punchline more than once.” For the opening episode of his unfortunately shortlived series about a live late-night comedy show, Sorkin has the show’s new producers stuck on the all-important “cold opening” number until someone says the inspirational word “model.” “You know who did the best frat humor of all time?” rhetorically asks Matt Albie (Matthew Perry). “It was W.S. Gilbert,” answers Danny Tripp (Bradley Whtiford). The team then proceed to fashion an opening number which rewrites “Modern Major General” from Pirates of Penzance to reflect the front-page news that the Tripp had “got caught doing blow.” What’s extraordinary is not just that we hear the routine being conceived and written, but we actually see it performed with full orchestra and chorus, everyone dressed in white. That’s actually where it fails for me—the “Musical of Andrew Lloyd Webber”-style concert staging, rather than a design more fitting to G&S. Still exhilarating, though, especially the build-up.

There’s a real-life precedent for G&S on SNL: the entire company of the Public Theatre production of Pirates of Penzance for a Christmas episode in 1980.
2. Sunday Night: Debbie Harry, Taj Mahal and Michele Gray doing “Never mind the why and wherefore” from HMS Pinafore, with sax and turntables, on the wondrous late-‘80s eclectic pop music variety series Sunday Night, produced by Lorne Michaels and hosted by Jools Holland and David Sanborn.

Rundgren did the Lord Chancellor’s Nightmare (“Love, unrequited, robs me from my rest”) from Iolanthe on his 1974 solo album Todd.
3. The Pirate Movie (1982). One of the factors that capsized the entire pirate adventure film for over a decade, until Johnny Depp set sail. This ridiculous, disrespectful rewrite of Pirates of Penzance (in the wake of Joe Papp’s Public Theater revival) features new songs such as “Pumpin’ and Blowin’ amid disco-ized treatments of G&S, vocalized by Kristy McNichol and Christopher (Blue Lagoon) Atkins.
4. With 1945’s Hollywood Pinafore, ace Broadway playwright George S. Kaufman showed his devotion to G&S by rewriting the lyrics and plots, which both demonstrates Kaufman’s extraordinary self-confidence and bravado and belies his professed hatred of Broadway musicals. Critics claimed his book, a satire of the golden age of Hollywood while it was still happening, was the weak link in this production, which ran 52 performances in 1945. Sample character names: Ralph Rackstraw, Little Miss Peggy. Sample song titles: “A Writer Fills the Lowest Niche,” “I Am the Monarch of the Joint,” “The Merry Maiden and the Jerk.”
5. Here’s a How-De-Do punk version by Bill Remmers.
6. Groucho Marx’s The Mikado. The Mikado is the G&S that has had the best-known conceptual overhauls over the years: There’s been a Cool Mikado (1962), a Black Mikado (1975), Peter Sellar’s modern Walkman-studded Mikado, and Jonathan Miller’s hit British version which showed the show to be a satire of England rather than Japan. (Eric Idle was Koko in the original British production of Miller’s version and its subsequent video, though Miller’s old Beyond the Fringe castmate Dudley Moore played the role in New York). Groucho’s, performed live for the Bell Telephone Hour in 1959, may be the best documented of any of them, coming up in virtually all the biographies of him and a few of his autobiographical projects. There was also a soundtrack album, reissued on CD in 2007. Groucho’s singing voice has deteriorated since his Captain Spaulding days, but he puts the songs across with great comic strength on the record, even without listeners being able to see his eyebrows. The rest of the cast isn’t shabby: Stanley Holloway, Helen Traubel, Dennis King, Barbara Meister and Robert Rounsville.
7. Pinafore! A gay-themed, nearly all-male 2001 adaptation by Mark Savage. Here in New Haven, one of the first productions by the Connecticut Gay Men’s Chorus was a Pirates of Penzance where everyone but Mabel was played by a man.
8. Animaniacs, HMS Yakko. Takes from both Pirates and Pinafore.

9. Tom Lehrer, “The Elements.” The periodic table sung to the tune of the Major-General’s song from Pirates of Penzance.
10. This one’s mine, and it’s Mikado again. At a coffeehouse concert in Bethany a few years ago I debuted my ukulele mash-up of “A Wandering Minstrel I” by Gilbert & Sullivan and “Uncle Albert/Admiral Halsey” by Paul McCartney & Wings. It has mercifully not been performed since.