Pirates! The Penzance Musical Broadway Review

The most thrilling performance for me is actually the one that Nicholas Barasch gives as Frederic, the juvenile/romantic lead, a character who sets off the deliberately silly (and mostly unchanged) plot. Having reached the age of 21, Frederic is ready to venture out into the world, leaving behind the band of tenderhearted, orphaned pirates to whom he was apprenticed as a child by mistake; his nurse Ruth misheard her master’s instructions to apprentice the boy to a pilot. Barasch thoroughly fulfills his early promise from the 2016 Broadway production of “She Loves Me” when at age 17, he portrayed the shop’s bike messenger who dreams of being a clerk. Here he is dashing and comic in equal and appropriate measure, with a swoon-worthy voice. He counts as a discovery, but one we could have seen as inevitable.