Sub-Par Steampunk or Second-Tier Disney?: Stratford's Pirates of Penzance

The Stratford Festival has a long history with the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. Many remember with great fondness the Festival's seminal production of The Mikado in the eighties, which had several revivals and a Broadway run. The productions of the other operettas that followed were just as handsomely dressed and casted (great Canadian stars such as Brent Carver and Maureen Forrester all had their turns in these productions), if not met with the same critical fervor. In 1961, The Pirates of Penzance had its first non D'Oyly Carte production at the Festival. So I was really excited to see the return of Gilbert and Sullivan to the festival.

I was not the only one; my little brother of seven years was seeing his very first play at the Festival the afternoon we attended, and he loves pirates. Particularly the ones who aren't very good at being dastardly.

Fantasy And Sci-fi In The Theatre: Opera

Theatre has always been a way to convey things that are not possible in the real world, a place where reality and magic converges and blurs. From the beginning of theatre, the audience was able to come face to face with the supernatural; witness Apollo descending from the heavens in Euripides's Orestes to cure all evils. Witness Prospero conjuring his fantastic storm, Puck tinkering with the love of mortals. Special effects meant to make these events seem more convincing were created almost as early as the first theatres.

Lately, however, the magic has been relocating more and more to the valley of death known as Hollywood, and theatre has been lost in a void of super realism or elements of magic that serve merely as plot points. Science fiction, a genre almost exclusive to film in the world of the visual arts, appears to have bypassed theatre completely. Valiant though the attempt may have been, the Metropolis or the Young Frankenstein musicals will never quite achieve the original films' level of greatness, nor can the Lord of the Rings stage production capture the epic sweep of the books like the filmed trilogy did. Spider-Man: Turn Off The Dark, despite everyone's best efforts and intentions, appears to have achieved a most paradoxical level of absurdity and mediocrity combined.

But even in theatre, where science fiction or fantasy seems to be almost toxic, there are a few outstanding and original examples. Listed below are a couple of my personal favourites. These shows are not cult classics, though I do like to listen to the Forbidden Planet cast album now and again; they are all successful works.

Part One of this series focuses with opera, which seems to like magic and science fiction a whole lot more than I anticipated.