I am so proud of this show.

Andrea and I were both determined to do this in '99, she because she's a big Gilbert and Sullivan fan (she actually preferred The Pirates of Penzance, but I don't know that show well) and I because I did H.M.S. Pinafore in sixth grade, playing a sailor and understudying Dick Deadeye for an eighth-grader named Lanier Benkard who happened to miss one of the performances, and of all the shows I'd done in school and camp in my youth, this one, I think, was the most fun and the most memorable. I remember having loved everything about that 1982 Dutchess Day School production; the sharp-looking sailor costumes and hats, the nautical set-pieces, the snappy, tuneful songs.

In reexamining the Gilbert & Sullivan operetta 17 years later, I realized a few things. The mirth and wit of W.S. Gilbert's lyrics and dialogue were beyond what my 11-year-old mind could have appreciated back then; this is actually a very funny show. It's an exceedingly simple social-class-love-triangle story whose resolution makes absolutely no sense at all, but it's such fun getting there that one really doesn't stop to ponder the implications (such as, is Josephine really in love with a sailor as old as her father, who is himself in love with a woman old enough to be his mother, and who was his foster mother, and how old is Little Buttercup, anyway? Not to mention the Admiral marrying his cousin...)

Arthur Sullivan's music, which sounds challenging when sung as opera by opera singers, is actually quite simple and not terribly hard to sing. I had never really thought of H.M.S. Pinafore as an opera, in fact I don't think I knew that it was when I did it in 1982, so despite numerous people telling me the show would be "impossible" (not the first time; this would become a recurring refrain in future years), I knew not only that it could be done, but that it could be excellent.

The opera singing was a problem, though. I knew that if I recorded the opera soundtrack onto the tapes I gave the actors to learn their songs, they'd hear the opera singers and freak out. So there had to be a way to show that the songs were actually much simpler than they sounded and could be sung by ordinary singers. The solution here was simple: I'd play and record the songs myself, and give those recordings to the kids instead of the opera soundtrack. Andrea, who had already decided not to come back to camp that summer, was nonetheless gracious, generous and patient enough to come to my house one day and record the female songs and male-female duets with me. I recorded the male-only songs separately. When we were finished, I had a master tape of all the songs from Pinafore that we were using in the adaptation, with non-opera vocals, arranged and orchestrated exactly as they would sound in the show. What could be easier?

Still, I took a lot of flak and ridicule over the selection of this show. Besides people telling me it was "impossible" or "too difficult," which is all I need to hear to get me to really want to do something, most people simply hadn't heard of it, and as people unfortunately tend to do, they assumed that anything of which they hadn't heard must necessarily have no value. I have always categorically rejected the idea that familiarity is the most important quality to consider when choosing shows. The idea that a person can only enjoy a show which he has already seen is ludicrous on its face. As an educator, I find that sort of thinking dangerous and disturbing.

Even some of the girls who had auditioned and been cast took exception, telling me, "We don't like this play," before sheepishly admitting that they had not yet read the script nor heard the songs. After Emily and I made it clear that this was the show we were doing, period, and gave them some time to read the script and decide, most of them decided to stick with it, and in the end, predictably, were glad they did.

Jaclyn Zukerman, who was new to camp that year, had a great audition and was cast as Buttercup, the mysterious peddler whose secret unravels the plot. Jamie Goldstein had a great audition and we cast her as Sir Joseph's Cousin Hebe, who's sort of the "leader" of his traveling band of female relatives which makes up the show's female ensemble. Some of the girls, however, wanted to be sailors, and as with the female ballplayers in Damn Yankees, we obliged them.

The only problem, really, with the adaptation was the character of Josephine, whose singing role is that of a true soprano; she has two solos in the operetta, "Sorry Her Lot" and "The Hours Creep On Apace," but the latter was so long and so difficult to learn, play and sing that I had to cut it. She did sing "Never Mind the Why and Wherefore" with the Captain and Sir Joseph, but with "Hours" and a lot of the incidental singing cut for time, Josephine wasn't left with much to do. Jana Katz, who had a wonderful voice and had played the adult Nala in The Lion King the year before, was cast in the role and in retrospect I wish we could have put more of the role back into the play.

As for the boys, they were raring to go; we got a great turnout for auditions and lots of talent to go around. The junior boys who had not been leads in Hair auditioned for Pinafore, including the dynamic duo of Marc Asnis and Dan Vesey, who had inexplicably been overlooked in casting the previous show and settled right into the roles of Ralph Rackstraw (pronounced "Rafe," as in movie actor Ralph Fiennes), the lovestruck sailor, and Captain Corcoran, whose daughter Josephine is the object of his affections. We also got plenty of contributions from the inter boys as well, including Matt Jalbert, a multi-talented kid who unfortunately only came to Pontiac for one summer, who had a great voice, strong delivery and stage presence and was cast as the Boatswain. Brett Copell blew us away with his audition and we cast him as the delightfully dastardly Dick Deadeye, a role which he clearly relished (if you look carefully on the video, you'll notice he kept switching his eye patch from one eye to the other).

The star of this show, though, was unquestionably Noah Cantor, who in his only featured role on the Pontiac stage gave such an appropriate air of superiority and pomposity to the role of the stuffy and befuddled admiral, The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., that it's just a dreadful shame that he never chose to perform again. He had an excellent singing voice, perfect diction, and uncanny facial expression; he was ideally suited to the role and played it with aplomb. Sir Joseph has some of the best lines and comic moments in the play, particularly as he torments Captain Corcoran over insignificant bits of etiquette while persistently mispronouncing the exasperated captain's name. Noah did a superb acting job here. Even now, after 18 shows, I think this could have been the single finest character portrayal in all my years at Pontiac.

Which is not to take away from the other performances, all of which were excellent, and I still think this is one of the best shows we've done in terms of the overall quality of the performance. Emily and Clare, in choreographing some of the numbers, provided an appropriate degree of silliness even in some of the more somber songs (the sailors following Ralph around the stage on their knees during the love ballad "A Maiden Fair to See" was priceless), and the entire cast just seemed to have a great time with this hundred-year-old British farce. This show was so much fun to do and the performance was so crisp and energetic that I couldn't help but be proud of it. When I think about how challenging the material was, and how expertly all of the actors performed those songs, the achievement becomes even more remarkable. I remain fiercely and justifiably proud of this show, and hope we get the chance to do it again in the future.
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