Vancouver Opera's HMS Pinafore brings new depth to Gilbert & Sullivan's familiar songs
Stage director Brenna Corner works with top-flight singers and writer JD Derbyshire to update the witty parody of the class system
HMS Pinafore (in a recent Eugene Opera production). Photo by Ari Denison
Vancouver Opera presents HMS Pinafore at the Queen Elizabeth Theatre from April 30 to May 8
TO UNDERSTANDING THE LASTING power of HMS Pinafore, look no further than “Cape Feare”, one of The Simpsons’ most famous episodes. In it, a murderous Sideshow Bob, voiced by Broadway and TV star Kelsey Grammer, asks a cornered Bart if he has any last requests. Bart responds with an appeal for his tormenter to sing the entire score of HMS Pinafore.
“Very well, Bart,” Sideshow Bob says. “I shall send you to heaven before I sent you to hell.” He then launches into rousing renditions of “We Sail the Ocean Blue”, “I’m Called Little Buttercup”, and more.
It’s hard to argue with Krusty the Clown's sidekick: the music of Gilbert & Sullivan is heavenly. And thanks to this and countless other pop-culture references—think The West Wing or Raiders of the Lost Ark, and remember Matt Damon’s falsetto as Little Buttercup in The Good Shepherd?—you probably know just about every tune in HMS Pinafore’s hit-packed musical.
That makes Vancouver Opera’s new rendition of the operetta a warm, familiar burst of uplift as we come out of a dark pandemic winter into a brighter post-sixth-wave spring. Still, stage director Brenna Corner hopes to illuminate more of the story behind the instantly recognizable music.
”To me the music is part of pop culture but the stories aren’t so much,” the director offers on a break from rehearsal. “There are snippets that exist in pop culture. You know, it’s a little bit like the first time people come to a Carmen and they hear the “Habanera” or they hear Escamillo sing his toast, and they go, ‘Why do I know this?’ And it’s probably because you’ve heard it in every elevator you’ve ever been in for 100 years. They’ve been playing this music forever!
“So for me it’s not so much about sending it up, but more about making sure that the story is really clear and engaging to the audience, because that’s how you clarify what all those things have been sending up.”
It’s worth noting that “G&S”’s songs from HMS Pinafore were insanely popular in their Victorian times as well; their work went on to influence musical theatre for the next century and a half.
It turns out they also had a key role in turning rising director Corner toward the opera. She started out in musical theatre—a natural inclination, with a mother who was a costume designer and a father who was a carpenter in the stage world. A gifted singer with dreams of Broadway, she never considered opera for a career. As she puts it, she had an idea that it was boring—“singing loud and standing still”.
It was a voice teacher who directed Corner toward listening to Gilbert & Sullivan, as performed by classically trained singers. And it was a revelation.
“It was like this bridge for me into opera,” she says. “I had no idea that you could have music sound that beautiful and be sung that beautifully and still be fun and entertaining and engaging. I always thought opera was something not like that. That event changed the trajectory of my plan.”
Corner went on to study opera, training for a time with Vancouver Opera’s Yulanda M. Faris Young Artists Program, eventually specializing in stage direction. She’s helmed productions like L’elisir d’amore and Hansel & Gretel at VO, as well as works at Seattle Opera, San Diego Opera, The Atlanta Opera, and elsewhere. And now she loves the idea of coming full circle, setting sail with this HMS Pinafore with a cast of standout North American opera talents, including soprano Caitlin Wood, tenor Ernesto Ramirez, baritone Peter McGillivray, and bass-baritone Marcus Nance, under the musical direction of Rosemary Thomson.
Their top-flight singing brings new colours and depth to the silly, social-satirical story of a Royal Navy ship, named for a women’s undergarment, that sails “over the bright blue sea”. Its lowly sailor Ralph Rackshaw is in love with the captain’s daughter, Josephine, but she’s betrothed to the higher-class but hopelessly hapless Admiral—allowing for generous lampooning of the British class system.
Director Brenna Corner
“To me there’s something the human voice can do in classical singing,” Corner says. “There's an emotional vulnerability and, yes, Olympic sort of nature of what singers can do with their voices, but also the connection of that instrument to the audience without amplification and with the support of that orchestra.”
The songs stand on their own, but Corner felt it was integral to update the libretto. For this production, comedian JD Derbyshire collaborated with her to adapt the 1878 work’s witty words for a modern audience.
“That was really important for me. I love Gilbert & Sullivan, but I also think when they were writing these pieces they were making a commentary on the time they were in,” she explains. “It was really important that we adapt them while still doing what they wanted to do. They were poking fun at the upper crust of society, and I think that we continue to do that.”
Some of the alterations were “flat-out technical things”, Corner says—such as words that no one would understand today. “So a little bit of vocabulary got written to help us understand.”
Other shifts surrounded the colonial themes, some dated jokes, and the female characters.
“With [Cousin] Hebe, she actually only sings and she has no dialogue, and we thought, ‘Wouldn’t it be great if we could find out who she was?’” Corner says. “And so it became a little bit of fleshing-out and trying to find the story in HMS Pinafore—it’s still the story everyone knows and loves, but it also rings true and hits a little more home for a modern audience.”
Those subtle, surprise tweaks, performed amid a classic nautical setting, should help audiences appreciate the operetta in a slightly new light the next time they see the famous parody parodied onscreen.
“HMS Pinafore is like this gem, and we’ve been looking at it through the light going through one particular angle,” Corner says, “and now we’re just looking at the jewel through a different angle and seeing different colours that come out of it.”
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