There are high Cs on the high seas at the Sydney Theatre… but no women to sing them.

Theatre director Sasha Regan recalls a poster for her production of Pirates of Penzance that neglected to mention a crucial detail. “It was playing at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, and for whatever reason the poster didn’t advertise that it was only with men.”

The audience was in for a shock, she says, when 16 men in frilly white dresses emerged onstage to sing the Climbing Over Rocky Mountain chorus in girlish falsetto. “They came out grinning ear to ear!” she laughs. And the joy of that coup de théâtre never left her as her all-male adaptation made the rounds in England, now showing in a season with Sydney Theatre Company.

“Testosterone-fuelled” and “Gilbert & Sullivan” aren’t phrases often bandied about together, but this Pirates of Penzance has yielded comparisons to other major, exclusively male extravaganzas such as Matthew Bourne’s Swan Lake and the ballet troupe Les Trockaderos de Monte Carlo, currently touring Australia (“We’re dying to meet them!”). But Regan insists that none of these can be dismissed as high-camp gimmick. “When you say ‘all-male’, people wonder whether it’s going to...