The Players’ seventh season opened with one
of W.S. Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan’s  most enduring and
delightful musical comedy romps, The Pirates of Penzance. Gilbert
wrote the book and lyrics, and Sullivan the music during their twenty-
five year collaboration. They produced fourteen musical comedies
during the last quarter of Queen Victoria’s reign on England’s throne.
Their influence is sensed in the works of Noel Coward, Cole Porter
and the Gershwins, and perhaps without them there may
have never been a Rogers & Hammerstein, a
Learner & Lowe, or a Stephen Sondheim. 

The Players’ production of Pirates of Penzance
was based on Joseph Papp’s Shakespeare In the Park
staging, as presented in New York’s Central Park, and the
subsequent Broadway and film productions in 1982. The revised
and re-orchestrated version renewed the interest and popularity of 
Gilbert and Sullivan’s work, re-discovering it to be a rousing, energetic,
comic romp, with it’s witty dialogue, effervescent re-orchestrated music, and
mixing the absurd with the romantic. The Players’ production was 
finely-tuned and superbly performed by a talented, uninhibited cast with
tongue firmly in cheek. It was wildly received every night
with standing ovations. and was perhaps our greatest
crowd-pleaser to that date - with tongue firmly
in cheek, it was cheerfully performed
by a highly energetic cast
“with cat-like tread!”