Joseph Papp's production of the Gilbert and Sullivan piece, transferred, with the cast intact, from stage to screen. It is not a mere documentation of the stage performance, but it remains essentially a stage play. True, we get fantastical sets evocative of the dream-scene sets in old MGM musicals. We get equivalents of the Keystone Kops, the Sennett Bathing Beauties, and Mabel Normand (the eyelash-batting Linda Ronstadt). We get Busby Berkeleyan choreographic floral patterns shot from above. We get Elvis Presleyan gestures and gyrations thrown into Rex Smith's big solo. We get Kevin Kline, as the Pirate King, done up as if for an Errol Flynn look-alike contest, although his hit-and-miss acrobatics bring to mind a more recent type of swashbuckler, a type Richard Lester milked dry in The Three and The Four Musketeers. And we get, in Tony Azito's footwork, an elasticity of movement seldom seen outside a Betty Boop cartoon. The ambience of old movies, thus evoked, does not make Pirates into more of a movie itself, but it does make it into more than Gilbert and Sullivan: the idea seems to have been to nudge the cultural references a bit closer to our own time and experience, while still striving to preserve the aura of quaintness that has enveloped Gilbert and Sullivan for decades. Directed by Wilford Leach. (1983) — Duncan Shepherd
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