A new, swinging version of HMS Pinafore is set to hit the Main Stage at Surrey Arts Centre with Second World War vibes and a layer of live Big Band sounds.
The trailblazing comic opera debuted in 1878, several decades before the setting of Fraser Valley Musical Theatre's production, staged from Friday, June 27 until July 6.
The story of love, honour and duty, by librettist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan, still combines hook-y melodies and witty lyrics poking fun at English class society, updated for the Surrey stage with a timeline twist and competing musical styles, director Mike Balser explains.
"We've set this at the beginning of the war, 1939," he said. "So it's the phony war, right? War has been declared but nothing's happening. So the Pinafore is at anchor in Spithead, except it's not a wooden ship, now it's a destroyer with five-inch guns instead of nine-pound guns. The uniforms are a bit different, the hierarchy is still the same — the captain and the rankings, all that still works very well.
"The only thing we couldn't change was the cat o' nine tails, because of course that kind of punishment was gone by 1939," Balser added. "But it's so intrinsic to the plot and to the lines that we decided to leave it in as one of Dick Deadeye's little revenge things."
Thane Buckingham's dastardly character warns Captain Corcoran (played by Wilson Fowlie) about the elopement plans of Ralph Rackstraw (Ming-Xuan Chung), a lower-class sailor, and Josephine (Terrelle Klose), the captain's daughter. Of course, things get messy with other characters in the mix including Little Buttercup (Saxony Eccleston), Sir Joseph Porter (Isaac Johnson), Cousin Hebe (Vanessa Siemens), Bob Becket (Jordyn Turetski) and Bill Bobstay (Jason Lam).
Twenty singing actors are on the deck of this Pinafore, plus a nine-musician band led by Kylie Fonacier, given the task of marrying opera with swing music.
"It's funny," Balser recalled, "because years ago, a lady with Surrey Civic Theatres was working a show with us, and she casually said, 'You guys should do Pinafore in World War II and make it swing,' and I went, 'That's actually a really good idea!' The more I thought about it, the more it worked because I have seen a ton of Pinafore productions and they're all very, very similar. We could shake it up a little bit if we made it jazzy."
One problem, he said, was finding a music director who could arrange an orchestra with flutes, piccolos and violins and make it swing. That's where Fonacier entered the picture.
"It's still an opera but it swings," the director noted. "She's new to this so it's a work in progress, but the recordings we've heard of the band are great, they have the feel we want."
The show is rehearsed at a pair of churches, in Newton and North Delta, with the swing choreography of Jason Warner.
For Balser, this Pinafore represents his 30th year with Fraser Valley Musical Theatre, founded in 1983 as Fraser Valley Gilbert & Sullivan Society.
"The first show I did was Pinocchio in 1995, and I'm still going, it's fun," Balser said. "We've changed because it used to be a panto every fall and a G&S show in the spring. The thinking was, let's do some different stuff, so we did Seussical in (the spring of) 2018, then a pandemic hit and we went back a little bit. We did Anything Goes and then The Addams Family, which was a lot of fun, went really well. Last year we did The Spongebob Musical, which was a great show but nobody comes to see it because they all have opinions about Spongebob, which they either love or hate.… The panto this fall will be Hansel and Gretel."
The early-summer staging of HMS Pinafore is not ideal, Balser agreed, at a time when most people want to be outside enjoying the warm weather.
"We would definitely do this in May if we had a venue that could accommodate the kind of shows that we do, venues available in May," he explained. "Our usual home is Surrey Arts Centre, and we've done shows in other places, but it's become more and more difficult to find those places."
Fraser Valley Musical Theatre's HMS Pinafore plays Wednesday to Sunday with 7:30 and 2:30 p.m. show times, depending on the day. Group and family tickets are available on tickets.surrey.ca, or call 604-501-5566.
