APPRENTICE TO A WHAT?? By Michael Clive
Nobody really knows who first said “dying is easy, comedy is hard.” But it’s apt for the comic world of Gilbert and Sullivan, which pokes fun at social conventions with a seeming effortlessness that only comes with enormous skill and hard work. Among English-language satires of manners and mores, nothing comes close to the series of musically rich, satirically witty operettas of librettist William Schwenk Gilbert and composer Sir Arthur Sullivan. Sullivan was one of the most gifted English composers of the 19th century, and was certainly the most successful of his generation. W.S. Gilbert was a brilliant writer whose satirical librettos are not just pleasing rom-coms in which lovers triumph
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over practical obstacles in appropriate pairs, but also razor-sharp satires that critique the social hypocrisies of Victorian England—and, by extension, any smug ruling class. The Pirates of Penzance, like all Gilbert and Sullivan operettas, is a frothy romp that kept Gilbert and Sullivan’s contemporary audiences too delightfully amused to notice that those witty satirical barbs were sometimes tipped with venom. The comedy is breezy and the music unfailingly melodic, but make no mistake: The music and the writing are both nuanced, and when the surface is utterly nonsensical, there is an inner logic that makes perfect sense.
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