OPERA REVIEW : Moody Steals Macdonald’s Revamped ‘Pinafore’ in S.F.

SAN FRANCISCO — Everybody’s doing it. Everybody’s doing it to poor, defenseless Gilbert and Sullivan.

A couple of weeks ago, Jonathan Miller had his way, as it were, with “The Mikado,” courtesy of the English National Opera and the Music Center Opera. Now, from faraway Canada, comes “H.M.S. Pinafore” as staged, rearranged, re-focused, rewritten, augmented and choreographed to the speedy and spiffy nines by Brian Macdonald.

The show, currently winding up its American tour at the much-too-large Golden Gate Theatre, is very funny. Chief credit for that goes to Ron Moody, the crisp and dry, stretch-faced, virtuosic, outrageously indulgent British comedian who turns the patter duties of the ruler of the queen’s navee into a wild and wonderful tour de force.

The show also happens to be bright, cute and pretty. Chief credit for that goes to Macdonald, whose quasi-balletic “Mikado” from the Stratford Festival recently illuminated Broadway and cable TV.

Reluctant as anyone these days to leave well-enough alone, he invents new verses, rewrites the script, adds elaborate dance numbers and turns the quaint satire into very broad farce.

But--and it is a big but--he manages to do most of the above without totally destroying the focus, fabric and point of the ancient original. For all its burlesque innovations, this remains the essential tale we love of the lofty lass who loved a lowly sailor.

The contemporary embellishments may not exactly be necessary. They certainly endanger the delicacy of the original structure. Nevertheless, they seldom function as fatal distraction.

The splendidly delirious visual scheme, conceived by Susan Benson, is dominated by a series of bizarre contraptions inspired by the Punch cartoons of Rowland Emett. Moody makes his entrance riding in an ornate fusion of spaceship, balloon and Piper Cub. The women arrive as passengers in a fleet of wheeled-jalopy boats outfitted with stuffed birds, escorted by deep-sea divers and propelled by cardboard oarsmen.

Despite the instant whimsy, the evening starts alarmingly. Macdonald trashes the overture and interpolates a lot of neo-nautical pantomime. Before long, the familiar rituals are embellished with billowy flag dances, with topical references to Messrs. Swaggart, Bush and North, with unlikely mid-aria transpositions, extraneous dialogue and potpourri padding of the score. (The “arrangements” are the work of one Berthold Carriere.)

It is enough to make an honest purist shudder.

The less stringent Savoyard can, however, have a good time in spite of the pizazz. Moody makes Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., the most maladroit lord of the admiralty in modern memory, and, perhaps, the most admirable, too. David Dunbar introduces a Captain Corcoran with the compelling twinkle of British bonhomie in his eye, and his tenorish baritone brings rare bel-canto finesse to the climax of the apostrophe to the moon.

Michael Brian is properly wide-eyed, too strong-voiced, agreeably athletic and amazingly boyish as Ralph Rackstraw. His messmates include Ted Pearson as a neatly nasty Dick Deadeye and Paul Massel as a brave and benign Boatswain.

Meg Bussert, musical-comedy ingenue par excellence, is forced to play sweet Josephine as a camp comedienne. This, clearly, is a dubious case of gilding the satiric lily. Luckily, she manages the charade with style and sings with easy lyric elan. Arlene Meadows offers a properly plump and pleasing, if decidedly un-British, Buttercup.

The assorted sisters, sailors, cousins and aunts look terrific, dance nimbly, sing rather feebly. The whole cast sings, it should be noted, with the distorting assistance of amplification.

In uttering a reprobation. . . .

The sonic intrusion also disfigures the orchestral contribution. The tiny show-biz band in the wired pit includes two electronic keyboards. Fen Watkin, decked out in a sailor suit of his own, conducts with clarity and brio, but his efforts are mechanically compromised from the start.

A pox on those infernal synthesizers and microphones.