• Included among the Record Descriptions of Favorite Albums (Part 1).
• Featuring Linda Ronstadt, The Pirates of Penzance stayed on Broadway for nearly two years and won a Tony Award and a Drama Desk Award. 

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The Pirates of Penzance (Broadway Cast) (1981):  As the career of a rock musician becomes established, most get at least a little out of their comfort zone, and nobody else did that to the same extent as Linda Ronstadt.  After a series of popular folk-rock, country, and rock albums from the late 1960’s to the early 1980’s, her first change-of-pace album was a collection of pop standards taken from the Great American Song Book called What’s New (1983) that Linda Ronstadt made with Nelson Riddle, one of the finest arrangers and conductors in the history of music, who is especially renowned for the recordings that he made with Frank Sinatra.  But her foray on Broadway actually came two years earlier.  In the late 1970’s, Linda Ronstadt approached New York theatrical producer Joseph Papp about finding “something small, beautiful and sweet” outside of her high-energy rock and roll milieu.  A few years later, Joseph Papp and the New York Shakespeare Festival assembled an unconventional cast for his new production of the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta The Pirates of Penzance dating from the 19th Century that remains popular to the present day. 

The production took liberties by remaking the operetta as nearly a sung-through musical and trimming the orchestration into an electric ensemble.  Also, a few songs were incorporated into the musical from two other Gilbert and Sullivan productions, H.M.S. Pinafore and Ruddigore.  Besides Linda Ronstadt, teen-idol Rex Smith was her romantic beau, with other starring roles played by Kevin Kline, Estelle Parsons, and George Rose.  The best-known song from The Pirates of Penzance is “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General” (often referred to as the “Major-General’s Song”), a tongue-twisting “patter song” that has been parodied frequently over the years; while the highlight from Linda Ronstadt is probably the song “Poor Wand’ring One”.  Unless you count an appearance on Sesame Street where she flirted with Kermit the Frog, The Pirates of Penzance is Linda Ronstadt’s first acting role.  In order to ease her into the part, four of her six lines of dialogue were sung.  But Linda Ronstadt worked hard to train her soprano voice, and she handles her upper register beautifully in the role, a side of her vocals that rarely comes out on her rock and country albums.  The Pirates of Penzance stayed on Broadway for nearly two years (787 performances) and won the Tony Award for Best Revival and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Musical.  After its Broadway run, The Pirates of Penzance was made into a film in 1983 with the same starring cast, except that Angela Lansbury replaced Estelle Parsons.