Last May, the Homecoming musical director did something uncharacteristically reckless. He asked me to help re-write “The Pirates of Penzance.” Not that Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic light opera needed my help. It has been entertaining audiences for 140 years just as they wrote it. But then again, 1879 was an awfully long time ago. Words change meaning, specific storylines become harder to follow and certain ideas pick up unfortunate cultural baggage. Plus, the Harding musical production team is a rowdy bunch, and they like to shake things up.
So they brought in someone with vast playwriting experience. Which consists of exactly one play. That I wrote in the fourth grade. Add that to my role as the elf who hated Christmas in elementary school, and you have the total extent of my theatrical career.
I still have the script of that first play. I called it “The Greatest Ant Colony Ever — Part III.” (I was inspired by “Star Wars” and wanted to start my ant epic “in medias res,” which is a Latin literary term meaning, “author who can’t think of a back story.”). I chose ants for a simple reason. This was a low-budget production, and fabric for tiny ant costumes is very cheap.
But don’t think for a minute that I didn’t have big ideas. Just one glance at the surviving scriptbook — handwritten in pencil and elegantly stapled inside a manila cover — will show just how much I thought this play through. There are stage directions. There are hand-colored set designs. There are costume sketches with parts helpfully labeled: hat, pants, fake moustache, etc.
Even the cast list shows precocious depth of characterization. Here are some samples, quoted exactly as I wrote them 30 years ago: “Harold E. Young — The mayor of the ant colony. He never uses contractions” (note the author’s acute grammatical sensibility even at age nine).
“Gary — A silly ant who is never serious.” “Army Commander — A person of panic.”
The plot is only three pages long, and involves the ants defeating a dragon and his army of killer bats. Appropriately, I set the play in England in April 1940. Now I ask you, what other fourth grader has such a sense of history? I can just imagine the drivel Tennessee Williams was writing at that age.
So with this stellar resume, I agreed to work on the musical we re-named “Pirates!?! A Pillaging of Gilbert and Sullivan.” As it turned out, I would be responsible for some of the pillaging. The team wanted to add scenes, change dialogue, re-write song lyrics, camp up the humor and replace awkward anachronisms with more contemporary anachronisms. I could already hear the Victorian duo spinning in their graves to the beat of an eighth note.
I suddenly realized that my fourth-grade foray into dramaturgy was not going to be much help. In fact, as I sat in on my first production meeting and listened to seasoned professionals toss out ideas 90 miles-a-minute, I felt a little like an ant myself. I became a person of panic.
But then I discovered that crafting a musical is not a solitary job. It’s a wonderfully collaborative process, and I had an incredible team to learn from. The end product is hardly the result of a single pen. So when you see the play this weekend, you will hear a great deal of Gilbert and Sullivan’s original words and music, as well as some added flapdoodle from me. But there will be so much more.
You will also hear composer Jordan Dollins’ delightful re-orchestrations — which took several months to complete. You’ll see creative sets, elaborate costumes, expert makeup and wonderfully choreographed sequences (“Cat-Like Tread” is one of my favorites).
You’ll see masterful lighting and sound direction and hear a skilled orchestra playing very challenging music. What you’ll see also couldn’t have happened without organized stage managers, prop masters and an unflappable producer/Pirate Queen. Not to mention the best musical director and finest rehearsal pianist this side of Broadway. And through it all you’ll see the hand of an experienced and patient director — no matter what you may think of his taste in script doctors.
Most visible of all, you’ll see a first-rate cast giving the Harding community a splendid gift of music and storytelling. Their stamp is on this show far more than mine, and they have taken it farther than I ever dreamed. You will need to watch it twice to see everything this energetic cast is doing.
I for one will never again watch a show without a deeper awe for what goes into it. In fact, being a part of this process has inspired me. I think I’ll go back and write Parts I and II of my fourth-grade saga. I’m calling it “With Ant-Like Tread.”
