H.M.S. Pinafore

Hey, Captain Corcoran, Ralph Rackstraw, Dick Deadeye, are characters in which Gilbert and Sullivan operetta?

Is it HMS Pinafore? Correct.

It's Pinafore.

Yes.

HMS Pinafore.

All right.

We've got four left.

So what have you been up

to? Yeah, well, on my side, we've just finished our run of HMS Pinafore.

So we had our last show today.

We had a matinee.

whose name was Miriam Wallowit and she wrote a Yiddish version of the Mikado another Gilbert and Sullivan show somewhere in the 50s and there was an amateur Gilbert and Sullivan company on Long Island that were doing Gilbert and Sullivan shows in Yiddish I'm sorry they were doing Gilbert and Sullivan shows in English and a bunch of them were Jews and they found this Yiddish Mikado and they performed it And then it went really well and they wanted to do something else.

And there Miriam also made a Yiddish version of HMS Pinafore, which is another government on the show.

So, but then they wanted to do Pinafore, but that the show was too short.

And so one of the members of the company whose name was Al Grand basically expanded it in Yiddish.

of...

HMS Pinafore, right? Because that's popular opera, isn't it? It'll be like Modern Major General or something like that.

Right, yeah.

So no, I... god i'm gonna sound really i'm gonna sound like such a culture snob i suppose i'm i'm reluctantly slowly coming to terms with the fact i might be a bit of a culture snob but certainly not snobby about people like i think anyone's anyone you know could embrace or like learn to love great culture but no i don't think dumbing it down and in the article you know i talk as well about um I guess, for want of a better term, sort of woke-ifying things, where you try and make things more accessible by taking complex, slightly challenging storylines and making them more palatable for people who are a bit more politically correct.

I have made a resolution that I'm only going to watch happy operas from now on.

Oh, good luck.

What are you going to watch? It's just going to be The Barber of Seville followed by The Barber of Seville and then again The Barber of Seville and then maybe some HMS Pinafore.

Yes, that's my new resolution.

yep All right.

Well, in Drama Class, Anya suggests that they can do Pippin or HMS Pinafore.

Of course.

The only thing I know about HMS Pinafore is that they did it on an episode of The Simpsons.

That's literally the only reason I would know anything about that.

We then see Sav and Declan and Jane are all in the class as well.

An eight-week light opera season at the Erlinger Theater in Atlanta in the summer of 1927.

The Pink Lady, The Red Mill, HMS Pinafore, The Wildflower, Pom Pom.

And then on the 6th of October 1927, his name went into a Broadway program.

My Princess, at the Sam S. Schubert Theatre on West 44th Street, Act II carried one line, Tango, Americ, and Neville.

York connection.

Yes! Yes, and because their previous production, HMS Pinafore, which was a great hit, but they didn't open it in the United States, so pirates in the audience, you know, theatrical pirates who saw that the London audience was crazy about this opera...

which made fun of the social distinction, the class distinctions of Victorian England.

And so people in the audience wrote down the lyrics and the melodies, and 150 troops in the United States performed various editions of HMS Pinafore, but Gilbert and Sullivan didn't make a penny from them because they had not opened the show in the United States and gained a copyright, the licensing... of the material.

So they learned their lesson, and they decided to open Pirates in New York.

And then many years later, around 1980, Linda Ronsad had a big hit on Broadway with Pirates of Penzance.

A bit of Shakespeare.

Opera? I did HMS Pinafore at the Coliseum down the road, yeah.

The only thing you've not done is say no to a job.

Yeah.