Pineapple Poll

Pineapple Poll
Choreographer	John Cranko
Music	Arthur Sullivan arranged by Charles Mackerras
Based on	"The Bumboat Woman's Story" by W. S. Gilbert
Premiere	13 March 1951 Sadler's Wells Theatre
Original ballet company	Sadler's Wells Ballet
Setting	Portsmouth, England and on board the H.M.S. Hot Cross Bun
Genre	Neoclassical ballet
Type	comic ballet

Pineapple Poll is a Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired comic ballet, created by choreographer John Cranko with arranger Sir Charles Mackerras. Pineapple Poll is based on "The Bumboat Woman's Story", one of W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads, written in 1870. The Gilbert and Sullivan opera H.M.S. Pinafore was also based, in part, on this story. For the ballet, Cranko expanded the story of the Bab Ballad and added a happy ending.

The piece premiered in 1951 at Sadler's Wells Theatre and was given many revivals internationally during the following decades. It remains in the repertoire of the Birmingham Royal Ballet. It has also been recorded many times.

Mackerras and his family were Gilbert and Sullivan fans. As a youth, at the all-male St Aloysius College in Sydney, he played Kate in The Pirates of Penzance, Leila in Iolanthe and Ko-Ko in The Mikado. In 1941–42, while at the NSW State Conservatorium of Music, he played the oboe for the J. C. Williamson Company during one of their Gilbert and Sullivan seasons. He was also a rehearsal pianist for the Kirsova ballet company, where he became familiar with the successful ballets based on Offenbach, Strauss and Rossini music: Gaîté Parisienne, Le Beau Danube and La Boutique fantastique. He felt that a similar arrangement of the music of Sullivan would also be popular.

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