VIDEO: It's Leap Day! Happy Birthday To Frederic of Penzance!

Not to spoil the plot for anyone yet to see Gilbert and Sullivan's 136-year-old operetta masterpiece THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE, but every four years, when February 29th rolls around, it's a great reminder of one of the musical stage's most absurd, and yet perfectly reasonable plot twists.

As you may recall, when Frederic was just a small English lad, his parents told his nursemaid Ruth to send him off to learn a trade by serving as apprentice to a ship's pilot. Instead, the hard-of-hearing Ruth accidentally contracted him to serve for a pirate until he was 21 years old.

While Frederic learned to abhor the pirate life of thievery, he also felt duty-bound to keep his word and serve his Pirate King nobly until turning 21, at which point, he vowed to bring them to justice.

But Messrs. Gilbert and Sullivan didn't make things so easy for him.

THE PIRATES OF PENZANCE gained new popularity in the summer of 1980, when Joseph Papp's New York Shakespeare Festival mounted director Wilford Leach's Broadway-slanted production at Central Park's Delacorte Theater. Originally starring George Rose, Patricia Routledge, Linda Ronstadt, Rex Smith, Kevin Kline and Tony Azito, the production moved to Broadway for a Tony-winning run.

Leach then directed a 1983 film version with most of the Broadway leads. In the clip below, Angela Lansbury's Ruth and Kevin Kline's Pirate King deliver startling news to Rex Smith's Frederic, concerning the matter of his leap day birthday.

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