Gilbert and Sullivan opened Pirates in New York to beat the real pirates
The title of The Pirates of Penzance hides a jab. After roughly 150 American companies staged H.M.S. Pinafore without paying a penny, Gilbert and Sullivan premiered their next opera on Broadway themselves, making it the only one of their works to debut officially in the United States.
American law at the time gave foreign authors no copyright protection. When Pinafore became a London hit in 1878, unlicensed American versions sprang up everywhere, often rewriting the text. The partners and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte decided to open the new piece in New York before anyone could copy it and to hold back the published score. The Fifth Avenue Theatre premiere on 31 December 1879 kept the first production's profits in their hands, and touring companies earned more, though over the following decade they never managed to control American performance rights.
Preparations were chaotic. Sullivan arrived in New York without his Act I sketches and rebuilt the act from memory, borrowing a chorus from their earlier opera Thespis; some scholars suspect that reuse was planned. To protect the British copyright, a touring troupe performing Pinafore in Torquay gave a hasty matinee in Paignton, Devon, the afternoon before the New York opening, reading from scripts in whatever costumes they had after a single rehearsal.
The plot is pure Gilbert. Frederic, apprenticed to soft-hearted pirates, expects his freedom at 21, only to learn that he was born on 29 February. Because his contract names his twenty-first birthday, he owes another 63 years, and his rigid sense of duty makes him accept. Gilbert recycled ideas from his 1870 piece Our Island Home and, George Bernard Shaw believed, from Offenbach's Les brigands, where theft is treated as a respectable trade.
London saw it on 3 April 1880, where it ran 363 performances, and the Major-General's Song has been parodied ever since. Joseph Papp's 1981 Broadway revival ran 787 performances and won the Tony for Best Revival, becoming a film in 1983.
Source: The Pirates of Penzance
