Musical Theatre / The Pirates of Penzance. At The Playhouse until April 6. Reviewed by BILL STEPHENS.

Hayes Theatre has earned an enviable reputation for its clever reductions of classic Broadway musicals. Canberra audiences have been treated to several of these productions, notably Sweet Charity and Calamity Jane.

This time intrepid show doctor, Richard Carroll, with the enthusiastic input of his musical collaborator, Victoria Falconer, has turned his attention to Gilbert & Sullivan and taken his trusty scalpel to one of their most popular creations, The Pirates of Penzance, and repurposed it as a wickedly silly laugh fest. 

Whether or not Gilbert or Sullivan would have approved, it was obvious from the response of the many of the G&S enthusiasts in the first night audience that they were delighted with the ingenuity of the production, with the result that every ticket for the whole Canberra season is already sold out.

Carroll, Falconer and their team of creatives set themselves an extra degree of difficulty by deciding that all the characters in this version of Pirates would be played by just five virtuoso actors.

To this end, set designer Nick Fry has devised a versatile setting approximating a run-down Victorian theatre, but packed with ingenious visual surprises. Witty costumes by Lily Mateljan complement the era while allowing lightning-fast changes, aided by ingenious lighting and sound by Jasmine Rizk and Daniel Herten, all monitored by the on-stage stage manager, Sherydan Simson.

There’s even room on stage for those audience members who paid extra for the privilege only to find themselves unwittingly engaged in the action.

Virtuoso performances are demanded of the cast who portray one, two or more roles as well as play musical instruments.

Brittanie Shipway delights playing both the female leads. As Mabel, the young but certainly not naïve heroine, she effortlessly negotiates the stratospheric coloratura of Poor Wondering One. 

Then, with hardly a bat of an eye, she becomes the more mature and manipulative Ruth, intent on inveigling into marriage, the handsome, noble, and possibly stupid, 21-year-old, Frederick, played with sly conviction and excellent voice by Maxwell Simon. 

For his part, Jay Laga’aia revels in his swashbuckling glory as The Pirate King, embraces his feminine side to portray, with surprising conviction, one of Mabel’s eclectic group of sisters, and joins Billie Palin attempting to portray a troupe of singing police recruits battling with some tricky baton choreography devised by Shannon Burns.

But it is the avuncular musical director, Trevor Jones, who steals the show being whisked around the stage at his piano impersonating a whole orchestra, singing with sisterly sweetness as one of Mabel’s sisters, but particularly with his show-stopping turn as the Major-General tossing off hilarious tongue-twisting lyrics with casual finesse.

It’s all delightfully silly, but remarkably, in all the threatening chaos, WS Gilbert’s story gets told, even though the story-telling gets a bit bumpy towards the end with the necessity to wind up all the outrageous shenanigans, and Arthur Sullivan’s music is respected, particularly in the beautifully sung second act opening for which the cast enter the theatre through the auditorium.