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Dress British, Sing Yiddish

GILBERT AND SULLIVAN’S song “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” may be one of the most repeated and parodied melodies in musical history. Only last month, the NBC series “Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip” updated the lyrics to poke fun at the fictional sketch-comedy show where its characters work: “We’ll be the very model of a modern network TV show.”

But in 127 years, no one has done a full-blown production of the entire operetta from which it comes, “The Pirates of Penzance,” in Yiddish. Until now. Next Sunday, the National Yiddish Theater — Folksbiene is presenting “Pirates,” or rather “Di Yam Gazlonim,” with both English and Russian supertitles at the JCC in Manhattan.

Theatrical translations, of course, are common. Still, Gilbert’s dazzling patterns of double and triple rhymes, his ingenious puns and his lyrics’ perfect match with Sullivan’s music make the work terribly difficult to translate. Why go to the trouble?

“I do this just for my own amusement,” said Al Grand, a retired New York City schoolteacher and lifelong Gilbert and Sullivan fan who started working on the translation 20 years ago. “I get pleasure when I’m able to do a line that scans and rhymes and all in Yiddish.”

Allen Lewis Rickman, the show’s director, said: “There’s nothing that difficult about the idea of going to see something in a language you don’t speak; people go see movies in foreign languages all the time. My aim is this: the audience of non-Yiddish speakers has to get a show that is every bit as good as the show that the Yiddish speakers are getting.”

Mr. Grand has labored to make sure the work remains pleasingly familiar. “I’m never satisfied until I’m absolutely certain that I’ve achieved a perfect match of verbal to musical cadence, so that the lyric conforms to the accentuation and rhythm of each musical phrase,” he said. “Wherever Gilbert rhymes, I rhyme. Sometimes he has an internal rhyme; I do the same thing in Yiddish. Otherwise, why do it at all?”

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Members of the cast of “Di Yam Gazlonim,” a Yiddish-language version of “The Pirates of Penzance” that includes supertitles in English and Russian.Credit...Scott Wynn

In his spare time, Mr. Grand has Yiddishized popular songs, from “Over the Rainbow” (“Iber Dem Regenboygn”) to “Danny Boy” and “White Christmas.” Still, “Di Yam Gazlonim” is unquestionably his biggest project to date. Its roots go back to the 1950’s, to the first time Mr. Grand heard Miriam Walowit’s Yiddish homage to “H.M.S. Pinafore” on a 78 r.p.m. record.

“I was enthralled,” Mr. Grand recalled. “I love Gilbert and Sullivan, and I love Yiddish, and hearing my two loves combined that way I had an epiphany.” While singing with an amateur Long Island Gilbert and Sullivan group in the 1970’s, Mr. Grand would “regale the cast in the wings” by singing Ms. Walowit’s versions. As the group frequently performed in synagogues, he suggested they perform in Yiddish, but was rebuffed. “Gilbert and Sullivan people are purists. They don’t want to change any word of Gilbert’s,” he said. “But ultimately, I prevailed.”

With a friend’s encouragement, Mr. Grand began to enlarge upon Ms. Walowit’s selections and to dip into the wider Gilbert and Sullivan canon. In the 1980’s, he tackled “Pirates.”

Mr. Grand emphasizes that his new show is not a translation. “I wrote a Yiddish version of the ‘Pirates of Penzance,’ ” he specified. “I would not call it a translation, because if I tried to translate every word Gilbert wrote into Yiddish it would be clumsy, it would not scan.” The show’s title, “Di Yam Gazlonim,” means, more or less, “The Rascally Robbers of the Sea” — a nod both to the fact that “piratn,” though Yiddish, is not as funny a word as “gazlonim,” and to the historical truth that the annals of buccaneering are not rife with Jewish pirates.

In the operetta’s opening chorus, “Pour, Oh, Pour the Pirate Sherry,” Gilbert’s lyrics go, “To make us more than merry, let the pirate bumper pass.” Mr. Grand found more audience-appropriate fare: “Un derlang undz beygl un seltzer; Veln mir ale freylekh zayn!” (“Give us bagels and seltzer! It’s a regular party!”) The Russian gloss, in Cyrillic (transliterated here), calls for bubliki and seltzer and explains, “Segodnya u nas prazdnik!” (“Today’s a holiday!”)

And the familiar lyrics to “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major General” are recast as “Ikh bin der groyser general un ikh bin oykh a guter yid.” The accompanying English supertitle reads, “I am a major general; and I’m a good Jew too.” Its Russian companion goes, “Ya general-mayor, i k tomu zhe — evrei” (“I’m a major general, and, to boot, a Jew”).

In the late 1990’s, as Mr. Grand was struggling with the task of adapting the English book of “Pirates,” he went to the YIVO Institute for Jewish Research to discuss his undertaking with Chana Mlotek, YIVO’s musical archivist. “She said, ‘You must speak to my son, Zalmen, and tell him what you’re doing,’ ” he recalled.

Zalmen Mlotek is the executive director of Folksbiene — literally, the People’s Stage — and the music director of “Di Yam Gazlonim.” “I found it so delicious and clever, the way he was faithful to the rhythm and humor of the original,” he said. “As soon as I saw it, I started to teach the songs to my chorale, the New Yiddish Chorale, and to work up concert versions.”

In Mr. Rickman’s opinion, supertitles and a show’s crossover value are critical to the survival of Yiddish theater. “If the show was directed only at the traditional Yiddish-speaking audience,” he said, “then Yiddish theater is dead in the water.” He has written the English supertitles, with a view to concision; his mother-in-law, Anna Plotkina, has done the Russian ones.

Bustling and tall, with a neat mustache, porkpie hat and plummy, kidding voice, Mr. Rickman evokes Bud Abbott and, coincidentally, looks a lot like his hero, Abraham Goldfaden, whom he calls “the father of the Yiddish theater.” A Romanian Jew, Mr. Goldfaden gave a turbo boost to the haskalah — the secularization of Jewish cultural expression — by “pretty much single-handedly” inventing Yiddish theater, Mr. Rickman said, adding that “he wrote the plays, he directed, produced, designed the costumes and the sets. He did everything.”

In the 2004-5 season, Mr. Rickman directed the Folksbiene’s acclaimed production of Goldfaden’s satire “A Novel Romance,” based on the Molière play “Les Précieuses Ridicules,” in which a picky Jewish spinster, obsessed by German romance novels, vexes her wealthy father by spurning her suitor Shloyme in favor of a Hochdeutsch-spouting mountebank named Franz. “Just as Goldfaden Judaized Molière,” he said, “Al Grand and I have Judaized Gilbert and Sullivan.”

In Mr. Grand’s adaptation of “Pirates,” the premise of Gilbert’s story receives Jewish tailoring. In the original, the hero, Frederick, is mistakenly apprenticed to pirates, instead of pilots, by his hard-of-hearing-nurse, Ruth; in Mr. Grand’s treatment, Fayvl’s dimwitted nurse, Rivke, apprentices him to a band of bearded men with knives between their teeth, whom she mistakes for a minyan of kosher butchers. “Es iz geven durkh mayn toes vos du bist arayngefaln in di hent fun di shtinkers,” Rivke wails: “It was my error that put you into the hands of these stinkers,” in the English supertitles. The original reads, “A sad mistake it was to make and doom him to a vile lot.”

So far, audience reception of concert performances of Mr. Grand’s works has been exuberant; back in 1988, when he copyrighted his lyrics to “Di Yam Gazlonim,” the prolific writer Isaac Asimov (author of “Asimov’s Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan for Americans”) wrote a glowing endorsement, commending the way Mr. Grand’s Yiddish lyrics preserved “the rhymes, the lilt and the wit” of Gilbert’s writing.

“I don’t know if Yiddish was even on Gilbert and Sullivan’s radar screen,” Mr. Mlotek said. “But the idea that their work would be translated into languages, and especially into Yiddish, which has this rich theatrical tradition — I think they would be smiling at the thought.”

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