SINCE 1879 Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta has been a crowd-pleaser (even if Mr Gilbert's libretto, tangentially critical of the then establishment, did not necessarily win favour with those at court). The much more recent Broadway revamp, with pop stars and re-orchestrations, brought it up to date in theatrical terms without disturbing its original intentions, and Noel Pearson's subsequent Dublin production under Patrick Mason's direction did similar handsome service to the original work.
Brian Merriman's latest reworking certainly pleased the crowd last night and received a rapturous reception. Yet it was a fussy rather than a focused production, infused with energy but sending not only the original work up but even sending its own presentation of that work up too. One suspects that neither Sullivan nor Gilbert would have been best pleased with this presentation for they took their creativity more seriously than that. But here is, undeniably, an amiable and lively Christmas entertainment which should pull crowds into the box office and send them home happy.
Gilbert's original irony on the admiration of the monarch which rendered the pirates impotent is passed over. The exactitudes required in the singing of his extraodinarily precise words are often blurred. Sullivan's music is frequently interrupted to make reference to musical cliche's of today. But it all went down well with last night's audience, and nobody seemed to mind that the settings for the first act best resembled cardboard cut-outs while the second act sets could not make their mind up whether they were a Celtic ruin or a Greek remainder, while, the lighting plot was, at best, eccentric. The whole lacked artistic integrity of purpose.
Ricky Paull Goldin provided an American-accented and innocuous pirate king. Des Keogh offered a nicely characterised but vocally inadequate Major General. Hazel O'Connor was a vocally challenging, Ruth who could have been allowed to develop the character more fully. Truest to the original authors' intentions was Jody Crosier's Frederic, tuneful and insufferably upright, and Karen Evans's Mabel (even while sending her own singing up) was spritely and largely faithful to the original text. Fran Dempsey never plodded a boot wrong as the Sergeant of Police, and the chorus of daughters, pirates and policemen were as lively a lot as any theatre production could wish, especially when indulging in Geri O'Kelly's energetic choreography.
