Libretto: W.S. Gilbert; Score: Arthur Sullivan; Arrangement: Kevin O'Donnell. At: The Hypocrites at Chopin Theatre, 1543 W. Division. Phone: 773-989-7352; $14-$28. Runs through: Jan. 30, 2011
Oh, those cute and crazy Hypocrites creative types! While the weather is freezing cold outside, The Hypocrites are heating up Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 comic operetta as a zany environmental basement beach party at the Chopin Theatre.
Oh, and are they actually attempting to perform the show with just 10 actors who also double up as the rag-tag orchestra? Yup, and the results sure are a loopy romp from start to finish.
Director Sean Graney's approach to Pirates of Penzance is to play up the silliness of the score by having his much-doubled up cast appear as a band of 1960s beatnik/beachcomber musicians who get the wacky notion in their heads that they'll stage the classic operetta by themselves.
Gilbert and Sullivan traditionalists shouldn't really get too annoyed at what Graney has wrought in Kevin O'Donnell's new one-act arrangement of The Pirates of Penzance (compete with an odd orchestration that includes accordions, guitars and a saw). After all, the original operetta is pure spoofs of 19th-century melodramatic and operatic theatrical conventions (and since the work is firmly in the public domain, there's no legal ground to complain).
Graney and his cast clearly revel in Gilbert's dexterous word play, especially since you can see the antecedents of Monty Python-style British humor throughout (particularly when the Pirate King of Robert McLean and the Major General of Matt Kahler discuss what it's like to be an orphan). Watching the cast of actor/musicians run riot (and shifting the audience around) through Tom Burch's breezy zigzag set of wooden piers and plastic swimming pools is just one of the pleasures of this show.
The only thing really missing is a true emotional connection between the cast and their characters—as one-dimensional they may be. This is particularly true with the romantic couple of Frederic and Mabel.
Zeke Sulkes doesn't genuinely show how high the stakes are for Frederic, who through a contractual discrepancy (and from his unerring steadfastness to be "the slave of duty") must turn down his love and become a thieving pirate again. Nor do we worry for the predicament of Christine Stulik's impressive banjo-strumming and mock-operatic trilling turn as Mabel/Ruth (in a weird piece of staging business, Stulik plays both roles of lover and middle-aged maid-of-all-work).
But dramatic honesty isn't something most people seek out of The Pirates of Penzance. It's fun, fun, fun, and The Hypocrites are doling out all that and more. For a sunny and silly break from the harsh Chicago winter, you can't do much better than spending two-and-a-half hours in the company of The Hypocrites' Pirates of Penzance.
