Hms Pinafore

Saturday, 29 December 2012

Gilbert & Sullivan - HMS Pinafore - John Reed - D'Oyly Carte Opera (Royston Nash)

HMS Pinafore - Never Mind the Why or Wherefore

HMS Pinafore: When I was a lad & Ruler of the Queen's Navee

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Berlin
Berlin ( /bɜrˈlɪn/; German pronunciation: [bɛɐ̯ˈliːn] ( listen)) is the capital city of Germany and one of the 16 states of Germany. With a population of 3.5 million people, Berlin is Germany's largest city and is the second most populous city proper and the eighth most populous urban area in the European Union. Located in northeastern Germany, it is the center of the Berlin-Brandenburg Metropolitan Region, which has 5.9 million residents from over 190 nations. Located in the European Plains, Berlin is influenced by a temperate seasonal climate. Around one third of the city's area is composed of forests, parks, gardens, rivers and lakes.
First documented in the 13th century, Berlin was the capital of the Kingdom of Prussia (1701–1918), the German Empire (1871–1918), the Weimar Republic (1919–1933) and the Third Reich (1933–1945).Berlin in the 1920s was the third largest municipality in the world. After World War II, the city became divided into East Berlin—the capital of East Germany—and West Berlin, a West German exclave surrounded by the Berlin Wall (1961–1989). Following German reunification in 1990, the city regained its status as the capital of Germany, hosting 147 foreign embassies.

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Boston
Boston (pronounced /ˈbɒstən/ or locally /ˈbɔstən/ ( listen)) is the capital of and largest city in Massachusetts, and is one of the oldest cities in the United States. The largest city in New England, Boston is regarded as the unofficial "Capital of New England" for its economic and cultural impact on the entire New England region. The city proper, covering only 48.43 square miles, had a population of 617,594 according to the 2010 U.S. Census. Boston is also the anchor of a substantially larger metropolitan area called Greater Boston, home to 4.5 million people and the tenth-largest metropolitan area in the country. Greater Boston as a commuting region is home to 7.6 million people, making it the fifth-largest Combined Statistical Area in the United States.
In 1630, Puritan colonists from England founded the city on the Shawmut Peninsula. During the late 18th century, Boston was the location of several major events during the American Revolution, including the Boston Massacre and the Boston Tea Party. Several early battles of the American Revolution, such as the Battle of Bunker Hill and the Siege of Boston, occurred within the city and surrounding areas. Through land reclamation and municipal annexation, Boston has expanded beyond the peninsula. After American independence was attained Boston became a major shipping port and manufacturing center, and its rich history now helps attract many tourists, with Faneuil Hall alone attracting over 20 million every year. The city was the site of several firsts, including America's first public school, Boston Latin School (1635), and the first subway system in the United States (1897).

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Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City. Along with London's West End theatre, Broadway theatre is widely considered to represent the highest level of commercial theatre in the English-speaking world.
The Broadway theatre district is a popular tourist attraction in New York. According to The Broadway League, Broadway shows sold approximately $1.081 billion worth of tickets in calendar year 2011, compared with $1.037 billion for 2010. Attendance in 2011 was 12.13 million.
New York did not have a significant theatre presence until about 1750, when actor-managers Walter Murray and Thomas Kean established a resident theatre company at the Theatre on Nassau Street, which held about 280 people. They presented Shakespeare plays and ballad operas such as The Beggar's Opera. In 1752, William Hallam sent a company of twelve actors from Britain to the colonies with his brother Lewis as their manager. They established a theatre in Williamsburg, Virginia and opened with The Merchant of Venice and The Anatomist. The company moved to New York in the summer of 1753, performing ballad operas and ballad-farces like Damon and Phillida. The Revolutionary War suspended theatre in New York, but thereafter theatre resumed in 1798, the year the 2,000-seat Park Theatre was built on Chatham Street (now called Park Row). The Bowery Theatre opened in 1826, followed by others. Blackface minstrel shows, a distinctly American form of entertainment, became popular in the 1830s, and especially so with the arrival of the Virginia Minstrels in the 1840s.

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Buckingham Palace
Buckingham Palace is the official London residence and office of the British monarch. Located in the City of Westminster, the palace is a setting for state occasions and royal hospitality. It has been a focus for the British people at times of national rejoicing and crisis.
Originally known as Buckingham House, the building which forms the core of today's palace was a large townhouse built for the Duke of Buckingham in 1705 on a site which had been in private ownership for at least 150 years. It was subsequently acquired by George III in 1761 as a private residence for Queen Charlotte, and known as "The Queen's House". During the 19th century it was enlarged, principally by architects John Nash and Edward Blore, forming three wings around a central courtyard. Buckingham Palace finally became the official royal palace of the British monarch on the accession of Queen Victoria in 1837. The last major structural additions were made in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including the East front which contains the well-known balcony on which the Royal Family traditionally congregate to greet crowds outside. However, the palace chapel was destroyed by a German bomb in World War II; the Queen's Gallery was built on the site and opened to the public in 1962 to exhibit works of art from the Royal Collection.

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Buenos Aires
Buenos Aires ( /ˈbweɪnəs ˈɛəriːz/ or /ˈaɪrɪs/,Spanish: [ˈbwenos ˈaiɾes]) is the capital and largest city of Argentina, and the second-largest metropolitan area in South America, after Greater Sao Paulo. It is located on the western shore of the estuary of the Río de la Plata, on the southeastern coast of the South American continent. Greater Buenos Aires conurbation, which also includes several Buenos Aires Province districts, constitutes the third-largest conurbation in Latin America, with a population of around thirteen million.
The city of Buenos Aires is not a part of Buenos Aires Province, nor is it the Province's capital, but an autonomous district. In 1880, after decades of political infighting, Buenos Aires was federalised and removed from Buenos Aires Province. The city limits were enlarged to include the towns of Belgrano and Flores (both are currently neighborhoods of the city). The 1994 constitutional amendment granted the city autonomy, hence its formal name: Ciudad Autónoma de Buenos Aires (Autonomous City of Buenos Aires). Its citizens first elected a Chief of Government (i.e. Mayor) in 1996; before, the Mayor was directly appointed by the President of the Republic.

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California
California (pronounced ⁱ/kælɨˈfɔrnjə/) is a state located on the West Coast of the United States. It is by far the most populous U.S. state, and the third most extensive (after Alaska and Texas). It is home to the nation's second- and sixth-largest census statistical areas (Los Angeles Metropolitan Area and San Francisco Bay Area), and eight of the nation's fifty most populated cities (Los Angeles, San Diego, San Jose, San Francisco, Fresno, Sacramento, Long Beach and Oakland). The capital city is Sacramento.
California's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west, to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east – from the Redwood–Douglas-fir forests of the northwest, to the Mojave Desert areas in the southeast. The center of the state is dominated by Central Valley, a major agricultural area. California contains both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States (Mount Whitney and Death Valley), and has the third-longest coastline of all states (after Alaska and Florida). Earthquakes are a common occurrence due to the state's location along the Pacific Ring of Fire: about 37,000 are recorded annually.

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Cape Town
Cape Town (Afrikaans: Kaapstad; Xhosa: iKapa) is the second-most populous city in South Africa, and the provincial capital and primate city of the Western Cape. As the seat of the National Parliament, it is also the legislative capital of the country. It forms part of the City of Cape Town metropolitan municipality. The city is famous for its harbour as well as its natural setting in the Cape floral kingdom, including such well-known landmarks as Table Mountain and Cape Point. Cape Town is also Africa's most popular tourist destination.
Located on the shore of Table Bay, Cape Town was originally developed by the Dutch East India Company as a victualling (supply) station for Dutch ships sailing to Eastern Africa, India, and the Far East. Jan van Riebeeck's arrival on 6 April 1652 established the first permanent European settlement in South Africa. Cape Town quickly outgrew its original purpose as the first European outpost at the Castle of Good Hope, becoming the economic and cultural hub of the Cape Colony. Until the Witwatersrand Gold Rush and the development of Johannesburg, Cape Town was the largest city in South Africa.

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Caribbean Sea
The Caribbean Sea is a sea of the Atlantic Ocean located in the tropics of the Western hemisphere. It is bounded by Mexico and Central America to the west and southwest, to the north by the Greater Antilles, and to the east by the Lesser Antilles.
The entire area of the Caribbean Sea, the numerous islands of the West Indies, and adjacent coasts, are collectively known as the Caribbean. The Caribbean Sea is one of the largest salt water seas and has an area of about 2,754,000 km² (1,063,000 sq. mi.). The sea's deepest point is the Cayman Trough, between the Cayman Islands and Jamaica, at 7,686 m (25,220 ft) below sea level. The Caribbean coastline has many gulfs and bays: the Gulf of Gonâve, Gulf of Venezuela, Gulf of Darién, Golfo de los Mosquitos, Gulf of Paria and Gulf of Honduras.
The name "Caribbean" is derived from the Caribs, one of the dominant American Indian groups in the region at the time of European contact during the late 15th century. After the discovery of the West Indies by Christopher Columbus in 1492, the Spanish term Antillas was assigned to the lands; stemming from this, "Sea of the Antilles" is a common alternative name for the Caribbean Sea in various European languages. During the first century of development, the Spanish dominance was undisputed.

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Copenhagen
Copenhagen ( /ˈkoʊpənheɪɡən/ or /ˈkoʊpənhɑːɡən/; Danish: København pronounced [kʰøb̥m̩ˈhɑʊ̯ˀn] ( listen), Latin: Hafnia) is the capital of Denmark and its most populous city, with an urban population of 1,213,822 (as of 1 January 2012 (2012 -01-01)^[update]) and a metropolitan population of 1,935,746 (as of 1 April 2012 (2012 -04-01)^[update]). With the completion of the transnational Øresund Bridge in 2000, Copenhagen has become the centre of the increasingly integrating Øresund Region. Within this region, Copenhagen and the Swedish city of Malmö are growing into a combined metropolitan area. Copenhagen is situated on the islands of Zealand and Amager.
First documented in the 11th century, Copenhagen became the capital of Denmark in the beginning of the 15th century. During the 17th century, under the reign of Christian IV, it became a significant regional centre.
Copenhagen is a major regional centre of culture, business, media, and science, as indicated by several international surveys and rankings (see International rankings below). Life science, information technology and shipping are important sectors, and research & development plays a major role in the city's economy. Its strategic location and excellent infrastructure, with the largest airport in Scandinavia,Kastrup, located 14 minutes by train from the city centre, have made it a regional hub and a popular location for regional headquarters and conventions.

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Fifth Avenue Theatre
Fifth Avenue Theatre was a Broadway theatre in New York City in the United States located at 31 West 28th Street and Broadway. It was demolished in 1939.
Built in 1868, it was managed by Augustin Daly in the mid-1870s. In 1877, it became the first air-conditioned theatre in the world. In 1879, it presented the world premiere of The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan and the New York premiere of H.M.S. Pinafore, followed by other Gilbert and Sullivan operas throughout the 1880s. The theatre continued to present both plays and musicals through the end of the century. At the beginning of the 20th century, the theatre presented English classics and then vaudeville, and later films, as well as plays and musicals.
The theatre was built in 1868 and was originally named Gilsey's Apollo Hall, in 1870 renamed the St. James Theatre. Its capacity was approximately 1,530 seats. In its early years, it offered lectures in the upstairs hall and musical entertainment in the main auditorium. When Augustin Daly's former Fifth Avenue Theatre (on 24th Street) burned down in 1873, Daly moved his company to the St. James, remodeled it and renamed it the New Fifth Avenue Theatre, where he continued as proprietor until 1877. The 1873 financial panic hurt business at the theatre in Daly's early years, but his 1875 production of The Big Bonanza was a big success, as was his production of Lemons.Mary Anderson and Helena Modjeska made their New York debuts at the theatre.Eleonora Duse also made her American debut at the theatre in 1893 in The Lady of the Camellias.

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French Riviera
The Côte d'Azur, pronounced [kot dazyːʁ], often known in English as the French Riviera (French: Côte d'Azur; Occitan: Còsta d'Azur; that is "Azure Coast"), is the Mediterranean coastline of the southeast corner of France, also including the sovereign state of Monaco. There is no official boundary, but it is usually considered to extend from the Italian border in the east to Saint Tropez, Hyères, Toulon or Cassis in the west.
This coastline was one of the first modern resort areas. It began as a winter health resort for the British upper class at the end of the 18th century. With the arrival of the railway in the mid-19th century, it became the playground and vacation spot of British, Russian, and other aristocrats, such as Queen Victoria and King Edward VII, when he was Prince of Wales. In the summer, it also played home to many members of the Rothschild family. In the first half of the 20th century it was frequented by artists and writers, including Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse, Edith Wharton, Somerset Maugham and Aldous Huxley, as well as wealthy Americans and Europeans. After World War II it became a popular tourist destination and convention site. Many celebrities, such as Elton John and Brigitte Bardot, have homes in the region. Officially, the Côte d'Azur is home to 163 nationalities with 83,962 foreign residents, although estimates of the number of non-French nationals living in the area are often much higher.

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London
London ⁱ/ˈlʌndən/ is the capital city of England and the United Kingdom, the largest metropolitan area in the United Kingdom, and the largest urban zone in the European Union by most measures. Located on the River Thames, London has been a major settlement for two millennia, its history going back to its founding by the Romans, who named it Londinium. London's ancient core, the City of London, largely retains its square-mile mediaeval boundaries. Since at least the 19th century, the name London has also referred to the metropolis developed around this core. The bulk of this conurbation forms the London region and the Greater London administrative area, governed by the elected Mayor of London and the London Assembly.
London is a leading global city, with strengths in the arts, commerce, education, entertainment, fashion, finance, healthcare, media, professional services, research and development, tourism and transport all contributing to its prominence. It is the world's leading financial centre alongside New York City and has the fifth-largest city GDP in the world (and the largest in Europe). London has been described as a world cultural capital. It was the world's most visited city during 2011 and London Heathrow is the world's busiest airport by number of international passengers. London's 43 universities form the largest concentration of higher education in Europe. In 2012 London will become the first city to host the modern Summer Olympic Games three times.

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Madrid
Madrid (English /məˈdrɪd/, Spanish: [ma'ðrid]) is the capital and largest city of Spain. The population of the city is roughly 3.3 million and the entire population of the Madrid metropolitan area is calculated to be 6.271 million. It is the third largest city in the European Union, after London and Berlin, and its metropolitan area is the third largest in the European Union after London and Paris. The city spans a total of 604.3 km² (233.3 sq mi).
The city is located on the Manzanares river in the centre of both the country and the Community of Madrid (which comprises the city of Madrid, its conurbation and extended suburbs and villages); this community is bordered by the autonomous communities of Castile and León and Castile-La Mancha. As the capital city of Spain, seat of government, and residence of the Spanish monarch, Madrid is also the political centre of Spain. The current mayor is Ana Botella from the People's Party (PP).
Madrid urban agglomeration has the 3rd largest GDP in the European Union and its influences in politics, education, entertainment, environment, media, fashion, science, culture, and the arts all contribute to its status as one of the world's major global cities. Due to its economic output, high standard of living, and market size, Madrid is considered the major financial centre of Southern Europe and the Iberian Peninsula; it hosts the head offices of the vast majority of the major Spanish companies, such as Telefónica, Iberia or Repsol. Madrid is the most touristic city of Spain, the fourth-most touristic of the continent, and is the 10th most livable city in the world according to Monocle magazine, in its 2010 index. Madrid also ranks among the 12 greenest European cities in 2010. Madrid is currently a Candidate City for the 2020 Summer Olympics.

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Melbourne
Melbourne ([ˈmelbən, -bn̩, ˈmæl-],rhotically /ˈmɛlbərn/) is the capital and most populous city in the state of Victoria, and the second most populous city in Australia. The Melbourne City Centre is the hub of the greater metropolitan area and the Census statistical division—of which "Melbourne" is the common name. As of June 2010, the greater geographical area had an approximate population of four million. Inhabitants of Melbourne are called Melburnians or Melbournians.
The metropolis is located on the large natural bay known as Port Phillip, with the city centre positioned at the estuary of the Yarra River (at the northernmost point of the bay). The metropolitan area then extends south from the city centre, along the eastern and western shorelines of Port Phillip, and expands into the hinterland. The city centre is situated in the municipality known as the City of Melbourne, and the metropolitan area consists of a further 30 municipalities.
Melbourne was founded in 1835 (47 years after the European settlement of Australia) by settlers from Launceston in Van Diemen's Land. It was named by governor Richard Bourke in 1837, in honour of the British Prime Minister of the day, William Lamb—the 2nd Viscount Melbourne. Melbourne was officially declared a city by Queen Victoria in 1847. In 1851, it became the capital city of the newly created colony of Victoria. During the Victorian gold rush of the 1850s, it was transformed into one of the world's largest and wealthiest cities. After the federation of Australia in 1901, it then served as the interim seat of government of the newly created nation of Australia until 1927.

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New York Hippodrome
The Hippodrome Theatre, also called the New York Hippodrome, was a theatre in New York City from 1905 to 1939, located on Sixth Avenue between 43rd and 44th Streets in the Theater District of Midtown Manhattan. It was called the world's largest theatre by its builders and had a seating capacity of 5,300, with a 100x200ft (30x61m) stage. The theatre had state of the art theatrical technology, including a rising glass water tank.
The Hippodrome was built by Frederick Thompson and Elmer Dundy, creators of the Luna Park amusement park at Coney Island, with the backing of Harry S. Black's U.S. Realty, a dominant real estate and construction company of the time, and was acquired by The Shubert Organization in 1909. In 1933, it was re-opened as the New York Hippodrome cinema, and became the stage for Billy Rose's Jumbo in 1935. Acts which appeared at the Hippodrome included numerous circuses, musical revues, Harry Houdini's disappearing elephant, vaudeville, silent movies such as Neptune's Daughter (1914) and Better Times (1922) and 1930s cinema.

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Olympic Theatre
The Olympic Theatre, sometimes known as the Royal Olympic Theatre, was a 19th-century London theatre, opened in 1806 and located at the junction of Drury Lane, Wych Street, and Newcastle Street. The theatre specialised in comedies throughout much of its existence. Along with three other Victorian theatres (Opera Comique, Globe and Gaiety), the Olympic was eventually demolished in 1904 to make way for the development of the Aldwych. Newcastle and Wych streets also vanished.
The first Olympic theatre was built in 1806 on the site of Drury House (later Craven House), for the impresario Philip Astley, a retired cavalry officer. The original name of the house was the Olympic Pavilion. It was said to be built from the timbers of the French warship Ville de Paris. It opened on 1 December 1806 as 'a house of public exhibition of horsemanship and droll.' In 1813, Astley sold the theatre to Robert William Elliston, who refurbished the interior and renamed it the Little Drury Lane, reflecting its proximity to the large Drury Lane Theatre nearby. Elliston had the theatre substantially rebuilt and reopened it with William Thomas Moncrieff's comedy Rochester – or, King Charles the Second's Merry Days. John Scott purchased the playhouse at Ellison's bankruptcy auction in 1826 and gave the building gas lighting.

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Opera Comique
The Opera Comique was a 19th-century theatre constructed in Westminster, London, between Wych Street and Holywell Street with entrances on the East Strand. It opened in 1870 and was demolished in 1902, to make way for the construction of the Aldwych and Kingsway. It is perhaps best remembered for hosting several of the early Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
The Opera Comique opened in 1870, followed shortly by construction of the adjoining Globe Theatre in Newcastle Street. It had a seating capacity of 862. The two theatres, both owned by Sefton Parry, were built back to back and called the "Rickety Twins", on the site of the former Lyon's Inn, an old Inn of Chancery, previously belonging to the Inner Temple. The theatre, built partly underground, had three entrances through long narrow tunnels from three streets (including the Strand) and was therefore nicknamed the "Theatre Royal, Tunnels". It was reportedly hastily built and draughty, and its long flight of stairs leading down to the level of the stalls was a dangerous fire hazard. However, it was nicely decorated. Parry built the theatre cheaply, hoping "to make handsome profits in compensation when the area was demolished, which was even then in contemplation".

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Ottawa
Ottawa (ⁱ/ˈɒtəwɑː/ or /ˈɒtəwə/) is the capital of Canada. It is the second largest city in Ontario and the fourth largest city in the country. The city is located on the south bank of the Ottawa River in the eastern portion of Southern Ontario. Ottawa borders Gatineau, Quebec, located on the north bank of the Ottawa River; together they form the National Capital Region (NCR).
Founded in 1826 as Bytown and incorporated as "Ottawa" in 1855, the city has evolved into a political and technological centre of Canada. Its original boundaries were expanded through numerous minor annexations and ultimately replaced by a new city incorporation and major amalgamation in 2001 which significantly increased its land area. The name "Ottawa" is derived from the Algonquin word adawe, meaning "to trade". Initially an Irish and French Christian settlement, Ottawa has become a multicultural city with a diverse population.
The 2011 census had the city's population as 883,391, and the metropolitan population as 1,236,324.Mercer ranks Ottawa with the second highest quality of living of any large city in the Americas, and 14th highest in the world. It is also rated the second cleanest city in Canada, and third cleanest city in the world. In 2012, the city was ranked for the third consecutive year as the best community in Canada to live in by MoneySense.

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Portsmouth
Portsmouth (ⁱ/ˈpɔːtsməθ/) is the second largest city in the ceremonial county of Hampshire on the south coast of England. Portsmouth is notable for being the United Kingdom's only island city; it is located mainly on Portsea Island. It is situated 64 miles (103 km) south west from London and 19 miles (31 km) south east from Southampton.
As a significant naval port for centuries, Portsmouth is home to the world's oldest dry dock still in use and also home to some famous ships, including HMS Warrior, the Tudor carrack Mary Rose and Lord Nelson's flagship, HMS Victory. Although smaller than in its heyday, the naval base remains a major dockyard and base for the Royal Navy and Royal Marine Commandos whose Headquarters resides there. There is also a thriving commercial ferryport serving destinations on the continent for freight and passenger traffic. The City of Portsmouth and Portsmouth Football Club are both nicknamed Pompey.
The Spinnaker Tower is a striking recent addition to the city's skyline. It can be found in the redeveloped former HMS Vernon, formerly a shore establishment or 'stone frigate' of the Royal Navy, now an area of retail outlets, restaurants, clubs and bars now known as Gunwharf Quays.

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Royal Opera House
The Royal Opera House is an opera house and major performing arts venue in Covent Garden, central London. The large building is often referred to as simply "Covent Garden", after a previous use of the site of the opera house's original construction in 1732. It is the home of The Royal Opera, The Royal Ballet, and the Orchestra of the Royal Opera House. Originally called the Theatre Royal, it served primarily as a playhouse for the first hundred years of its history. In 1734, the first ballet was presented. A year later, Handel's first season of operas began. Many of his operas and oratorios were specifically written for Covent Garden and had their premieres there.
The current building is the third theatre on the site following disastrous fires in 1808 and 1857. The façade, foyer, and auditorium date from 1858, but almost every other element of the present complex dates from an extensive reconstruction in the 1990s. The Royal Opera House seats 2,256 people and consists of four tiers of boxes and balconies and the amphitheatre gallery. The proscenium is 12.20 m wide and 14.80 m high. The main auditorium is a Grade 1 listed building.

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Royalty Theatre
The Royalty Theatre was a small London theatre situated at 73 Dean Street, Soho and opened on 25 May 1840 as Miss Kelly's Theatre and Dramatic School and finally closed to the public in 1938. The architect was Samuel Beazley, a resident in Soho Square, who also designed St James's Theatre, among others. An earlier theatre also named the Royalty existed in Wells Street, Wellclose Square, London from 1787 until the early part of the nineteenth century.
The theatre originated with an attempt by the actress, Frances Maria Kelly (1790–1882), to establish a dramatic academy, and thereafter it had a long tradition of actress-management. 'The theatre was small, obscurely sited, perilously combustible and rarely prosperous for long, partly by reason of its consequent use for occasional or independent ventures, but it housed some productions of note'. However, there was a relatively spacious stage, and Beazley's work in the auditorium was thought pretty. The Times described the theatre as 'most elegantly fitted up and appointed, and painted in a light tasteful manner.’ The theatre was designed as a bijou for a fashionable audience, and a box was taken by Queen Adelaide.

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Samarkand
Coordinates: 39°39′15″N 66°57′35″E / 39.65417°N 66.95972°E / 39.65417; 66.95972
Samarkand (Tajik: Самарқанд; Persian: سمرقند‎; Uzbek: Samarqand; from Sogdian: "Stone Fort" or "Rock Town") is the second-largest city in Uzbekistan and the capital of Samarqand Province. The city is most noted for its central position on the Silk Road between China and the West, and for being an Islamic centre for scholarly study. In the 14th century it became the capital of the empire of Timur (Tamerlane) and is the site of his mausoleum (the Gur-e Amir). The Bibi-Khanym Mosque remains one of the city's most notable landmarks. The Registan was the ancient center of the city.
In 2001, UNESCO added the city to its World Heritage List as Samarkand – Crossroads of Cultures.
The city was known by an abbreviated name of Marakanda when Alexander the Great took it in 332BC. There are various theories of how Marakanda evolved into Samarkanda/Samarkan. One derives the name from the Old Persian asmara, "stone", "rock", and Sogdian kand, "fort", "town". Others less convincingly derive the name from the old Turkic "Semiz-Kent" meaning "Rich City".^{[citation needed]}. Since the name Marakanda was already in existence 2300 years ago and long before anyone had heard of Turks in that region of Transoxiana, this version is likely a folk etymology.

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Savoy Theatre
The Savoy Theatre is a West End theatre located in the Strand in the City of Westminster, London, England. The theatre opened on 10 October 1881 and was built by Richard D'Oyly Carte on the site of the old Savoy Palace as a showcase for the popular series of comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, which became known as the Savoy Operas as a result.
The theatre was the first theatre, and the first public building in the world, to be lit entirely by electricity. In 1889, Richard D'Oyly Carte built the Savoy Hotel next to the theatre. For many years, the Savoy was the home of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and it was run by the Carte family for over a century. Richard's son Rupert D'Oyly Carte rebuilt and modernised the theatre in 1929, and it was rebuilt again in 1993 following a fire. It is a Grade II* listed building.
Apart from The Mikado and other famous Gilbert and Sullivan premières, the theatre has hosted such notable premières as Noël Coward's Blithe Spirit in 1941. In recent years it has presented opera, Shakespeare and other non-musical plays, as well as musicals, including revivals of Fiddler on the Roof and Carousel, and new shows like Never Forget. The original London production of Legally Blonde played from December 2009 to April 2012.

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Shanghai
Shanghai is the largest city by population of the People's Republic of China (PRC) and the largest city proper by population in the world. It is one of the four province-level municipalities of the PRC, with a total population of over 23 million as of 2010. It is a global city, with influence in commerce, culture, finance, media, fashion, technology, and transport. It is a major financial center and the busiest container port in the world.
Located in the Yangtze River Delta in eastern China, Shanghai sits at the mouth of the Yangtze River in the middle portion of the Chinese coast. The municipality borders Jiangsu and Zhejiang Provinces to the west, and is bounded to the east by the East China Sea.
Once a fishing and textiles town, Shanghai grew in importance in the 19th century due to European recognition of its favorable port location and economic potential. The city was one of several opened to foreign trade following the British victory over China in the first opium war and the subsequent 1842 Treaty of Nanking which allowed the establishment of the Shanghai International Settlement. The city then flourished as a center of commerce between east and west, and became the undisputed financial hub of the Asia Pacific in the 1930s. However, with the Communist Party takeover of the mainland in 1949, the city's international influence declined. In the 1990s, the economic reforms introduced by Deng Xiaoping resulted in an intense re-development of the city, aiding the return of finance and foreign investment to the city.

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Spithead
Coordinates: 50°45′05″N 1°08′12″W / 50.75140°N 1.13667°W / 50.75140; -1.13667
Spithead is an area of the Solent and a roadstead off Gilkicker Point in Hampshire, England. It is protected from all winds, except those from the southeast. It receives its name from the Spit, a sandbank stretching south from the Hampshire shore for 5 km (3.1 mi); and it is 22.5 km (14.0 mi) long by about 6.5 km (4.0 mi) in average breadth. Spithead has been strongly defended since 1864 by fortifications complementing those of Portsmouth.
The Fleet Review is a British tradition that usually takes place at Spithead, where the monarch reviews the massed Royal Navy.
In 1797 there was a mutiny, the Spithead mutiny, in the Royal Navy fleet at anchor at Spithead.

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Sydney
Sydney ( /sɪdni/) is the most populous city in Australia and the state capital of New South Wales. Sydney is classified as an Alpha+ World City indicating its influence in the region and throughout the world.
Sydney is located on Australia's south-east coast of the Tasman Sea. As of June 2010, the greater metropolitan area had an approximate population of 4.6 million people. Inhabitants of Sydney are called Sydneysiders, comprising a cosmopolitan and international population.
The site of the first British colony in Australia, Sydney was established in 1788 at Sydney Cove by Arthur Phillip, commodore of the First Fleet as a penal colony. The city is built on hills surrounding Port Jackson which is commonly known as Sydney Harbour, where the iconic Sydney Opera House and the Harbour Bridge feature prominently. The hinterland of the metropolitan area is surrounded by national parks, and the coastal regions feature many bays, rivers, inlets and beaches including the famous Bondi Beach and Manly Beach. Within the city are many notable parks, including Hyde Park and the Royal Botanic Gardens.

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The Crystal Palace
The Crystal Palace was a cast-iron and plate-glass building originally erected in Hyde Park, London, England, to house the Great Exhibition of 1851. More than 14,000 exhibitors from around the world gathered in the Palace's 990,000 square feet (92,000 m²) of exhibition space to display examples of the latest technology developed in the Industrial Revolution. Designed by Joseph Paxton, the Great Exhibition building was 1,851 feet (564 m) long, with an interior height of 128 feet (39 m). Because of the recent invention of the cast plate glass method in 1848, which allowed for large sheets of cheap but strong glass, it was at the time the largest amount of glass ever seen in a building and astonished visitors with its clear walls and ceilings that did not require interior lights, thus a "Crystal Palace".
After the exhibition, the building was rebuilt in an enlarged form on Penge Common next to Sydenham Hill, an affluent South London suburb full of large villas. It stood there from 1854 until its destruction by fire in 1936. The name Crystal Palace (the satirical magazine Punch usually gets the credit for coining the phrase) was later used to denote this area of south London and the park that surrounds the site, home of the Crystal Palace National Sports Centre.

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United States
The United States of America (commonly abbreviated to the United States, the U.S., the USA, America, and the States) is a federal constitutional republic comprising fifty states and a federal district. The country is situated mostly in central North America, where its forty-eight contiguous states and Washington, D.C., the capital district, lie between the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans, bordered by Canada to the north and Mexico to the south. The state of Alaska is in the northwest of the continent, with Canada to the east and Russia to the west, across the Bering Strait. The state of Hawaii is an archipelago in the mid-Pacific. The country also possesses several territories in the Pacific and Caribbean.
At 3.79 million square miles (9.83 million km²) and with over 312 million people, the United States is the third or fourth largest country by total area, and the third largest by both land area and population. It is one of the world's most ethnically diverse and multicultural nations, the product of large-scale immigration from many countries. The U.S. economy is the world's largest national economy, with an estimated 2011 GDP of $15.1 trillion (22% of nominal global GDP and over 19% of global GDP at purchasing-power parity). Per capita income is the world's sixth-highest.

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Vienna
Vienna ( /viːˈɛnə/; German: Wien (help·info) [viːn]) is the capital and largest city of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million (2.4 million within the metropolitan area, more than 25% of Austria's population), and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre. It is the 9th-largest city by population in the European Union. Until the beginning of the 20th century it was the largest German speaking city in the world, and before the first world war and the splitting of the Austro-Hungarian empire the city had 2 million inhabitants. Vienna is host to many major international organizations, including the United Nations and OPEC. The city lies in the east of Austria and is close to the borders of the Czech Republic, Slovakia, and Hungary. These regions work together in a European Centrope border region. Along with nearby Bratislava, Vienna forms a metropolitan region with 3 million inhabitants. In 2001, the city centre was designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

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Watermill Theatre
The Watermill Theatre is an award -winning, professional repertory theatre with charitable status. It is a converted watermill with gardens beside the River Lambourn, in Bagnor, near Newbury, Berkshire, England. It retains many of its original architectural features such as the waterwheel, which is viewed through a screen on entry to the auditorium; also wooden beams and corn chutes, which protrude incongruously through the lighting arrays. Although housed in a 200 year old building, the theatre uses state of the art technology.
Jill Fraser was a co-owner of the theatre (with her husband James Sargant) from 1981 until her death in 2006, and under her artistic direction it developed into a significant regional theatre. Jill's vision has led the Watermill to build an excellent reputation worldwide, whilst also encouraging creativity and growth at home; for example, many of today's successful theatre practitioners began their careers at the Watermill before going on to further their careers elsewhere (probably most famously Bill Nighy, Sean Bean and David Suchet); many of these people retain a personal and professional connection with the Watermill Theatre. The Theatre was put up for sale by the Sargant family 2008. A development board was established, chaired by Ralph Bernard, and was successful in raising funds to purchase the building and grounds. The theatre is now run by a Board of Trustees and is managed by the current artistic and executive director, Hedda Beeby, who took over in 2007. Under her leadership the Watermill continues to evolve and to enjoy considerable success.

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Windsor Castle
Windsor Castle is a medieval castle and royal residence in Windsor in the English county of Berkshire, notable for its long association with the British royal family and for its architecture. The original castle was built after the Norman invasion by William the Conqueror. Since the time of Henry I it has been used by a succession of monarchs and is the longest-occupied palace in Europe. The castle's lavish, early 19th-century State Apartments are architecturally significant, described by art historian Hugh Roberts as "a superb and unrivalled sequence of rooms widely regarded as the finest and most complete expression of later Georgian taste". The castle includes the 15th-century St George's Chapel, considered by historian John Robinson to be "one of the supreme achievements of English Perpendicular Gothic" design. More than five hundred people live and work in Windsor, making it the largest inhabited castle in the world.
Originally designed to protect Norman dominance around the outskirts of London, and to oversee a strategically important part of the River Thames, Windsor Castle was built as a motte and bailey, with three wards surrounding a central mound. Gradually replaced with stone fortifications, the castle withstood a prolonged siege during the First Barons' War at the start of the 13th century. Henry III built a luxurious royal palace within the castle during the middle of the century, and Edward III went further, rebuilding the palace to produce an even grander set of buildings in what would become "the most expensive secular building project of the entire Middle Ages in England". Edward's core design lasted through the Tudor period, during which Henry VIII and Elizabeth I made increasing use of the castle as a royal court and centre for diplomatic entertainment.

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Yale University
Yale University is an American private Ivy League research university located in New Haven, Connecticut. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States.
Incorporated as the "Collegiate School," the institution traces its roots to 17th-century clergymen who sought to establish a college to train clergy and political leaders for the colony. In 1718, the College was renamed "Yale College" to honor a gift from Elihu Yale, a governor of the British East India Company. In 1861, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences became the first U.S. school to award the PhD. Yale became a founding member of the Association of American Universities in 1900. Yale College was transformed, beginning in the 1930s, through the establishment of residential colleges: 12 now exist and two more are planned. Yale employs over 1,100 faculty to teach and advise about 5,300 undergraduate and 6,100 graduate and professional students. Almost all tenured professors teach undergraduate courses, more than 2,000 of which are offered annually.

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Alan Bennett
Alan Bennett (born 9 May 1934) is a British playwright, screenwriter, actor and author. Born in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire, he attended Oxford University where he studied history and performed with The Oxford Revue. He stayed to teach and research medieval history at the university for several years. His collaboration as writer and performer with Dudley Moore, Jonathan Miller and Peter Cook in the satirical revue Beyond the Fringe at the 1960 Edinburgh Festival brought him instant fame. He gave up academia, and turned to writing full time, his first stage play Forty Years On being produced in 1968.
His output includes The Madness of George III and its film incarnation The Madness of King George, the series of monologues Talking Heads, the play The History Boys, and popular audio books, including his readings of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Winnie-the-Pooh.
Bennett was born in Armley in Leeds, West Riding of Yorkshire. The son of a co-op butcher, Walter and his wife Lilian Mary (nee Peel), Bennett attended Christ Church, Upper Armley, Church of England School (in the same class as Barbara Taylor Bradford) and then Leeds Modern School (now Lawnswood School), learned Russian at the Joint Services School for Linguists during his national service and gained a place at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge. However, having spent time in Cambridge during national service, and partly wishing to follow the object of his unrequited love, he decided to apply for a scholarship at Oxford University. He was accepted by Exeter College, Oxford from which he graduated with a first-class degree in history. While at Oxford he performed comedy with a number of eventually successful actors in the Oxford Revue. He was to remain at the university for several years, where he researched and taught Medieval History, before deciding he was not cut out to be an academic.

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Alan Styler
Alan Styler (1925 – 1 September 1970) was an English opera singer, best known for his performances in baritone roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. He married former D'Oyly Carte chorister Vera Ryan.
Alan Styler was born in Redditch, Worcestershire. He joined the Grenadier Guards at the age of seventeen. After leaving the service in 1946, he pursued his aspirations to become a professional singer. He joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company chorus in 1947 and soon assumed the role of Antonio in The Gondoliers.
In 1948, Styler added the role of Second Yeoman in Yeomen of the Guard and was also understudy for the "juvenile" baritone roles. He began, in 1949, to fill in frequently as the Counsel in Trial by Jury, Strephon in Iolanthe, Pish-Tush in The Mikado, and Giuseppe in The Gondoliers. In 1949, he added the roles of Mr. Cox in Cox and Box, the Associate in Trial, and Grosvenor in Patience. He continued to play these roles through 1952, except for brief periods when he was ill or when others briefly played some of these roles. In 1953, Styler added Richard Cholmondeley, the Lieutenant of the Tower, in Yeomen.

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Alfred Cellier
Alfred Cellier (1 December 1844 – 28 December 1891) was an English composer, orchestrator and conductor.
In addition to conducting and music directing the original productions of several of the most famous Gilbert and Sullivan works and writing the overtures to some of them, Cellier conducted at many theatres in London, New York and on tour in Britain, America and Australia. He composed over a dozen operas and other works for the theatre, as well as for orchestra, but his 1886 comic opera, Dorothy, was by far his most successful work. It became the longest-running piece of musical theatre in the nineteenth century.
Cellier was born at Hackney, in London. His parents were Arsène Cellier from France, a professor of languages at Hackney grammar school, and his wife Mary Ann. He was educated at the grammar school in Hackney. From 1855 to 1860, he was a chorister at the Chapel Royal, St. James's, under the Rev. Thomas Helmore, where Arthur Sullivan was one of his schoolmates. Cellier later married Harriet Emily. Cellier's brother, François, also became a conductor.

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Alice Barnett
Alice Barnett (17 May 1846 – 14 April 1901) was an English singer and actress, best known for her performances in contralto roles of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Barnett began her career by 1873 in oratorio and other concert work. Using her imposing physical stature to her advantage, she originated several of the early Gilbert and Sullivan "formidable middle-aged ladies", namely Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance (1879), Lady Jane in Patience (1881) and the Fairy Queen in Iolanthe (1882). She then performed in various comic operas in Britain, America, Australia and New Zealand until 1889, earning strong critical praise. After this, she toured in several of the Gaiety burlesques before creating the role of Dame Hecla Cortlandt in W. S. Gilbert and Osmond Carr's His Excellency in 1894. From 1895, she played in Edwardian musical comedy, pantomime and non-musical plays until 1900.
Barnett was born in London, daughter of Charles Barnett and Fanny Kemble. She was the second of three children. Her elder brother Harry Kemble Barnett (d. 1914) became a stage manager. Among her theatrical antecedents were her great aunt, Sarah Siddons and her great-great uncles John Philip Kemble and Charles Kemble. She trained as a concert singer under Natalia Macfarren, the wife of George Alexander Macfarren, and made many appearances as a contralto soloist around Britain. She sang in oratorios such as Mendelssohn's Elijah,Rossini's Stabat Mater, and Handel's Messiah, as well as concerts of ballads and other lighter repertoire.

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Allan Sherman
Allan Sherman (November 30, 1924 – November 20, 1973) was an American comedy writer and television producer who became famous as a song parodist in the early 1960s. His first album, My Son, the Folk Singer (1962), became the fastest-selling record album up to that time. His biggest hit single was "Hello Muddah, Hello Fadduh", a comic novelty in which a boy describes his summer camp experiences to the tune of Ponchielli's Dance of the Hours.

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Arthur Sullivan
Sir Arthur Seymour Sullivan MVO (13 May 1842 – 22 November 1900) was an English composer of Irish and Italian ancestry. He is best known for his series of 14 operatic collaborations with the dramatist W. S. Gilbert, including such enduring works as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. Sullivan composed 23 operas, 13 major orchestral works, eight choral works and oratorios, two ballets, incidental music to several plays, and numerous hymns and other church pieces, songs, and piano and chamber pieces. The best known of his hymns and songs include "Onward Christian Soldiers" and "The Lost Chord".
The son of a military bandmaster, Sullivan composed his first anthem at age eight. He was selected as soloist in the boys' choir of the Chapel Royal. The Reverend Thomas Helmore, the choirmaster, encouraged Sullivan and arranged for the publication and performance of his early compositions. In 1856, the Royal Academy of Music awarded the first Mendelssohn Scholarship to the 14-year-old Sullivan, allowing him to study first at the Academy and then in Germany, at the Leipzig Conservatoire. His graduation piece was a suite of incidental music to Shakespeare's The Tempest. When it was performed in London in 1862, it was an immediate sensation. Sullivan began his composing career with a series of ambitious works, interspersed with hymns, parlour ballads and other light pieces. Among his best received early pieces were a ballet, L'Île Enchantée (1864), and his Irish Symphony, Cello Concerto and Overture in C (In Memoriam) (all in 1866). From 1861 to 1872, he supplemented his income by working as a church organist and as a music teacher.

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Bart Simpson
Bartholomew JoJo "Bart" Simpson is a fictional main character in the animated television series The Simpsons and part of the Simpson family. He is voiced by actress Nancy Cartwright and first appeared on television in The Tracey Ullman Show short "Good Night" on April 19, 1987. Bart was created and designed by cartoonist Matt Groening while he was waiting in the lobby of James L. Brooks' office. Groening had been called to pitch a series of shorts based on Life in Hell but instead decided to create a new set of characters. While the rest of the characters were named after Groening's family members, Bart's name was an anagram of the word brat. After appearing on The Tracey Ullman Show for three years, the Simpson family received its own series on Fox, which debuted December 17, 1989.
At ten years old, Bart is the eldest child and only son of Homer and Marge, and the brother of Lisa and Maggie. Bart's most prominent character traits are his mischievousness, rebelliousness and disrespect for authority. He has appeared in other media relating to The Simpsons, including video games, The Simpsons Movie, The Simpsons Ride, commercials, and comic books; he has also inspired an entire line of merchandise. In casting, Nancy Cartwright originally planned to audition for the role of Lisa, while Yeardley Smith tried out for Bart. Smith's voice was too high for a boy, so she was given the role of Lisa. Cartwright found that Lisa was not interesting at the time, so instead auditioned for Bart, which she thought was a better role. Hallmarks of the character include his chalkboard gags in the opening sequence; his prank calls to Moe the bartender; and his catchphrases "Eat my shorts", "¡Ay, caramba!", and "Don't have a cow, man!"

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Benjamin Disraeli
Benjamin Disraeli, 1st Earl of Beaconsfield, KG, PC, FRS, (21 December 1804 – 19 April 1881) was a British Prime Minister, parliamentarian, Conservative statesman and literary figure. He served in government for three decades, twice as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom. Although his father had him baptised to Anglicanism at age 12, he was nonetheless Britain's first and thus far only Prime Minister who was born into a Jewish family—originally from Portugal. He played an instrumental role in the creation of the modern Conservative Party after the Corn Laws schism of 1846.
Although he was a major figure in the protectionist wing of the Conservative Party after 1844, Disraeli's relations with the other leading figures in the party, particularly Lord Derby, the overall leader, were often strained. Not until the 1860s would Derby and Disraeli be on easy terms, and the latter's succession of the former assured. From 1852 onwards, Disraeli's career would also be marked by his often intense rivalry with William Ewart Gladstone, who eventually rose to become leader of the Liberal Party. In this feud, Disraeli was aided by his warm friendship with Queen Victoria, who came to detest Gladstone during the latter's first premiership in the 1870s. In 1876 Disraeli was raised to the peerage as the Earl of Beaconsfield, capping nearly four decades in the House of Commons.

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Bertha Lewis
Bertha Lewis (12 May 1887 – 8 May 1931) was an English opera singer and actress primarily known for her work as principal contralto in the Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Bertha Amy Lewis was born in Forest Gate, London. She attended St. Angela's High School, Upton and then studied voice at the Royal Academy of Music, gaining an A.R.A.M. qualification. She had made professional appearances on the concert stage but had not acted before she joined D'Oyly Carte at the age of 19 in 1906 as Kate in The Pirates of Penzance. She soon was touring with the company as Kate, Lady Saphir in Patience, Leila in Iolanthe, Ada in Princess Ida, Vittoria in The Gondoliers, and First Bridesmaid in Trial by Jury. In 1908, at the Savoy Theatre, she played the part of Gwenny Davis in Fenn and Faraday's A Welsh Sunset, a curtain raiser to H.M.S. Pinafore. She soon added to her repertoire Leila in Iolanthe and Inez in The Gondoliers.
In 1909 she replaced Ethel Morrison as principal contralto, playing Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ruth in Pirates, Lady Jane in Patience, the Queen of the Fairies in Iolanthe, Lady Blanche in Princess Ida, Katisha in The Mikado, Dame Carruthers in The Yeomen of the Guard, and the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers. She left the company in 1910 to tour the UK in concerts and grand opera, appearing in the title role of Bizet's Carmen, as Delilah in Camille Saint-Saëns's Samson and Delilah, and as Amneris in Verdi's Aida.

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Bill Robinson
Bill “Bojangles” Robinson (May 25, 1878 – November 25, 1949) was an American tap dancer and actor of stage and film. Audiences enjoyed his understated style, which eschewed the frenetic manner of the jitterbug in favor of cool and reserve; rarely did he use his upper body, relying instead on busy, inventive feet, and an expressive face.
A figure in both the black and white entertainment worlds of his era, he is best known today for his dancing with Shirley Temple in a series of films during the 1930s.
Robinson was born in Richmond, Virginia to Maxwell, a machine-shop worker, and Maria Robinson, a choir singer. He was raised by his grandmother after both parents died in 1885 when he was 7 years old—his father from chronic heart disease and his mother from natural causes. Details of Robinson's early life are known only through legend, much of it perpetuated by Robinson himself. He claimed he was christened "Luther"—a name he did not like. He suggested to his younger brother Bill that they should exchange names. When Bill objected, Luther applied his fists, and the exchange was made.

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Blanche Roosevelt
Blanche Roosevelt (October 2, 1853 - September 10, 1898), was an American opera singer and author. Her father was state Senator Tucker of Wisconsin.
Born Blanche Roosevelt Tucker in Sandusky, Ohio (some sources say she was born in Virginia), she traveled to Europe with her mother for vocal studies in Paris and Milan.
As Mlle. Rosavella, she made her singing debut at the Royal Italian Opera House, Covent Garden, in 1876 as Violetta in La Traviata. She was the first female American performer to sing Italian opera there. She went on to sing in concerts in Milan, Belgium, Holland, and Paris. She also worked as a special correspondent from Paris in 1875 for newspapers in Chicago and London.
Arthur Sullivan heard the soprano while on holiday in the south of France in the summer of 1879. In September 1879, Roosevelt joined the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company and made her debut at the Opera Comique, as a replacement for Josephine during the original run of Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore. She was then chosen by W. S. Gilbert, Sullivan, and Richard D'Oyly Carte to play Josephine for American audiences in the first authentic D’Oyly Carte Pinafore at New York’s Fifth Avenue Theatre, beginning on December 1, 1879. On December 31 of that year, in the same theatre, she created the role of Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, playing the character in New York and on tour until March 1880, when she left the Company.

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Brooks Atkinson
Justin Brooks Atkinson (November 28, 1894 – January 14, 1984) was an American theatre critic. He worked for The New York Times from 1925 to 1960. In his obituary, the Times called him "the most important reviewer of his time."
Atkinson was born in Melrose, Massachusetts, where, as a boy, he printed his own newspaper (using movable type), and planned a career in journalism. He graduated from Harvard University in 1917, and worked at The Springfield Daily News and the Boston Evening Transcript, where he was assistant to the drama critic. In 1922, he became the editor of the New York Times Book Review, and in 1925 the drama critic.
Atkinson quickly became known for his commitment to new kinds of theatre—he was one of the first critical admirers of Eugene O'Neill—for his interest in all kinds of drama, including off-Broadway productions, and for his wit. In 1928, he said of the new play The Front Page, "No one who has ground his heels in the grime of a police headquarters press room will complain that this argot misrepresents the gentlemen of the press." Atkinson had covered the police beat for the Evening Transcript.

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Charles Goulding
Charles Goulding (c.1887 – 9 November 1939) was an English operatic tenor best known for his performances with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the Gilbert and Sullivan repertory.
Goulding was born in Ireland and became an orphan as an infant. He was brought up by relatives in Bristol, England, where he sang as a choirboy at St. Mary Redcliffe beginning at the age of eight. He then sang at Colston Hall with Dame Clara Butt, Charles Santley, and Saunders at one of the Triennial Leeds Festivals. After this, he performed with the Royal Orpheus Glee Club and the Bristol Amateur Operatic Society. Goulding served with distinction in the army during the World War I and was wounded several times.
In 1919, Goulding joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company on tour, first performing in the chorus, but soon playing principal tenor roles in the Savoy operas. His first roles, in the summer of that year, were Nanki-Poo in The Mikado, Colonel Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard, and Marco in The Gondoliers. He became the main tenor in one of the organisation's touring companies (known as the "New" company) and played Nanki-Poo, Fairfax, Marco and Earl Tolloller in Iolanthe for the season, later singing the romantic baritone role of Strephon in Iolanthe instead. In 1921, he added to his repertoire the role of Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance.

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Charles Mackerras
Sir Alan Charles Maclaurin Mackerras, AC, CH, CBE (/məˈkɛrəs/; 17 November 1925 – 14 July 2010) was an Australian conductor. He was an authority on the operas of Janáček and Mozart, and the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan. He was long associated with the English National Opera (and its predecessor) and Welsh National Opera and was the first Australian chief conductor of the Sydney Symphony Orchestra.
Charles was born in Schenectady, New York, to Australian parents, Alan Mackerras and Catherine MacLaurin. His father was an electrical engineer and a Quaker. In 1928, when Charles was aged three, the family moved to Sydney, Australia. They initially lived in the suburb of Vaucluse, and in 1933, moved to the then semi-rural suburb of Turramurra. Mackerras was the eldest of their seven children, including five brothers, the others being Malcolm, Colin, Alastair and Neil and two sisters, Joan and Elisabeth. They are descendants of the pioneer Australian musician Isaac Nathan. Mackerras studied violin at the age of seven and later the flute and was setting poems to music at eight, and wrote a piano concerto when he was 12.

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Clement Scott
Clement Scott (6 October 1841–1904) was an influential English theatre critic for the Daily Telegraph, and a playwright and travel writer, in the final decades of the 19th century. His style of criticism - acerbic, flowery, and (perhaps most importantly) carried out on the first night of productions, set the standard for theatre reviewers through to today.
Born the son of William Scott, the vicar of Hoxton in north London, Clement William Scott converted to Roman Catholicism before his 21st birthday. Educated at Marlborough College, he became a civil servant, working in the War Office beginning in 1860.
Encouraged to write by the humorist Tom Hood the younger, who also was a clerk in the War Office, Scott contributed to Era, Weekly Dispatch, and to Hood's own paper, Fun, where Scott and W. S. Gilbert were colleagues. Scott's interest in writing and the theatre led him to brief dalliance with the failed Victoria Review.
He became the dramatic writer for The Sunday Times in 1863 but held the position for only two years because of the intemperance of his published opinions and his unpopular praise of the French theatre. In 1871, Scott began his nearly thirty years as a theatre critic with The Daily Telegraph. He also contributed regularly to Theatre magazine and wrote sentimental poetry and song lyrics (including "Oh Promise Me"), which were often published in the magazine Punch by his friend, the editor, F. C. Burnand. Scott continued to work at the War Office until 1879, when he finally decided to earn his living entirely by writing.

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Darrell Fancourt
Darrell Fancourt (8 March 1886 – 29 August 1953) was an English bass-baritone, known for his performances and recordings of the Savoy Operas.
After a brief concert career, Fancourt joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, where he starred in more than 10,000 performances over a 33-year period until his death. He regularly played about ten different roles for the company over these years, including the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, Dick Deadeye in H.M.S. Pinafore, and the title character in The Mikado, which he played more than 3,000 times. Fancourt was famous for his melodramatic style, creating the controversial Mikado laugh that was later adopted by some of his successors. His performances are preserved in nineteen of the company's recordings made between 1923 and 1950.
Fancourt was born Darrell Louis Fancourt Leverson, the younger son of three children of a Jewish family in Kensington, London. His father, Louis George Leverson (1860–1909), was a diamond merchant who had made a fortune in South Africa. His mother, Amelia (Amy) de Symons, née Lewis-Barned (1865–1931), was "a clever vivacious young artist of the musical comedy type". Both were staunch friends of the arts. Fancourt was baptised into the Church of England when he was fourteen years old.

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David Russell Hulme
David Russell Hulme (born 19 June 1951) is a Welsh conductor and musicologist known for his research and publications on the music of Sir Arthur Sullivan, the Victorian era composer who, with Sir W. S. Gilbert, was responsible for the Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy Operas.
A native of Machynlleth, Wales, Russell Hulme studied music at the University College of Wales Aberystwyth and studied conducting with Sir Adrian Boult. Gaining an MA and PhD for his research into British Music, he has published extensively, including articles for the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians and the BBC Proms. Russell Hulme completed his PhD thesis on the autograph manuscripts of Sullivan's comic operas in 1985 at the University of Wales. The thesis has been widely circulated among Sullivan scholars and Gilbert and Sullivan fans.
Russell Hulme regularly conducts throughout Britain and Ireland. In 2001 he toured Australia and New Zealand, where he conducted the State Orchestra of Victoria, the Auckland Philharmonia and the Sydney Opera House Orchestra. He tours with the Carl Rosa Opera Company as conductor and chorus-master, including the Company's tours of North America in 2004 and 2006. Russell Hulme also has written articles on Gilbert and Sullivan and has lectured at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival, where he also conducted a 2009 professional revival of Princess Ida. Russell Hulme has reconstructed songs from Gilbert and Sullivan operas where the music had been partially lost, including the Duke's first act aria from Patience.

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Derek Oldham
Derek Oldham (29 March 1887 – 20 March 1968) was an English singer and actor, best known for his performances in the tenor roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
After performing in concerts as a boy soprano and working as a bank clerk, Oldham began a professional performing career in 1914. With the outbreak of World War I, he joined the Scots Guards, serving with valour. After the war, he joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, singing the tenor leads in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas for three years. He then starred in musicals and operettas in the West End in the 1920s, including Madame Pompadour, The Merry Widow, Rose-Marie and The Vagabond King. He returned to the D'Oyly Carte for brief periods from 1929 to 1937.
Oldham continued singing, recording and acting through the 1940s, also appearing in several films. He concentrated on legitimate theatre in the 1950s, acting until the age of 70. He maintained a lifelong interest in Gilbert and Sullivan, serving as an officer of the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. He finally retired to Hampshire during the last ten years of his life.

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Donald Adams
Charles Donald Adams (20 December 1928 – 8 April 1996) was an English opera singer and actor, best known for his performances in bass-baritone roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and his own company, Gilbert and Sullivan for All.
Adams began his career with the BBC Repertory Company in 1944. Among other early performances, he was leading man with Great Yarmouth Repertory Company for two years. In 1951, he joined the D'Oyly Carte organisation and soon began to play roles, becoming the company's principal bass until 1969. With Thomas Round and Norman Meadmore, he formed the touring company, Gilbert and Sullivan for All, in which he continued to sing bass and bass-baritone roles as well as directing. By the early 1980s, Adams was performing in opera and operetta throughout Britain and abroad, continuing nearly until his death. He recorded many of his roles, particularly his Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire.
Donald Adams was born in Bristol and educated at the Bristol Cathedral School, where he sang as a chorister in the cathedral and played Thomas Becket in Murder in the Cathedral at the age of sixteen. While still at school, he made his first professional appearance as an actor in 1944 with the BBC Repertory Company. He studied with an Italian singing teacher in London, Rodolfo Melle (who had sung at La Scala with the great tenor Aureliano Pertile), who taught Adams to sustain the vowels of a word before reaching the consonants. This, Adams said, gave the voice "a nice line", and he continued to practise Melle's lessons until the end of his life.

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Ella Halman
Ella Louise Halman (July 18, 1906 – March 20, 1995) was an English opera singer, best known for her performances in the contralto roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. She married another D'Oyly Carte performer, L. Radley Flynn, in 1940.
Halman was born in Ealing, Middlesex. At age eighteen, Halman won the Sussex County Scholarship in singing, then studied for several years at the Brighton School of Music.
After touring for three years with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, she completed her studies in London. After some experience in concert work and teaching, she joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company as a chorister in 1937. Soon she assumed the role of Inez in The Gondoliers and, as understudy, began occasionally to play Katisha in The Mikado and the Duchess of Plaza-Toro in The Gondoliers. By 1939, she was also filling in as Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance and the Queen of the Fairies in Iolanthe.
On Christmas Day in 1939, Halman became the D'Oyly Carte principal contralto. For the next eleven years, she played Ruth in Pirates, Lady Jane in Patience, Queen of the Fairies in Iolanthe, Katisha in The Mikado, Dame Carruthers in The Yeomen of the Guard, the Duchess of Plaza Toro in The Gondoliers, Dame Hannah in Ruddigore, and Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore.

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Elsie Griffin
Elsie Griffin (6 December 1895 – 21 December 1989) was an English opera singer, best known for her performances in the soprano roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Beginning her career by entertaining British troops in France during World War I, she popularized such songs as Danny Boy. She was a principal soprano with the D'Oyly Carte from 1919 to 1926, also recording several of her roles with the company both during that time and afterwards. She married another D'Oyly Carte performer, J. Ivan "Jimmy" Menzies, in 1923. She continued her singing and acting careers into the 1950s, including tours with the Carl Rosa Opera Company from 1934 to 1937.
Elsie Griffin was born in Bristol, England, and sang onstage as a child prodigy. She attended the St. Michael's on the Mount Primary School. She was joint winner in the mezzo-soprano category at the Bristol Music Festival in 1914. During World War I, she made her professional debut in the concerts of Lena Ashwell's company, formed at the request of King George V, singing concerts to entertain Britain's troops in France. John Arlott wrote of her, "Hers was the voice in Fred Weatherly's songs, Danny Boy and Roses of Picardy, that is preserved in the mind's ear of surviving 1914–18 trench fodder." Her performances of these two songs made them into two of the most popular hits of the era.

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Emma Howson
Emma Howson (28 March 1844 – 28 May 1928) was an Australian opera singer and actress primarily known as the creator of the principal soprano role of Josephine in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic opera H.M.S. Pinafore.
Howson, the niece of diva Emma Albertazzi (also born Emma Howson), was born in Hobart Town, Tasmania, and performed as a child in concerts with her father, Frank (a baritone and conductor) and her brothers. Her father, with his tenor brother, John, moved to Sydney in 1845 and remained based there until the mid-1860s when, at the suggestion of American actor Joseph Jefferson, the family travelled to America. Emma's early musical education and training therefore took place in Sydney, where one of her early mentors and teachers was the renowned English contralto Sara Flower.
In America, Howson began to perform in English opera as Amina in La Sonnambula (1866) as well as in comedy, drama, farce and burlesque. She achieved success in engagements in California, and the family troupe worked its way east, through Salt Lake City, where the Howsons were the first opera troupe seen by the Mormons. Her father died during that tour in 1869. The family eventually arrived in New York, where Emma performed in Wallace's Maritana. In other North American cities, she played roles in Auber's Fra Diavolo, The Bohemian Girl, Martha, Oberon, The Marriage of Figaro, Der Freischütz and Il Trovatore, among others. In 1873, she travelled to Europe with her brother Frank and studied in Milan, Italy for two years. She debuted in Malta in 1875 as Amina. In 1876, she arrived in England and toured in Italian operas in the English provinces with the Royal Italian Opera.

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Emmie Owen
Emmie Owen (November 28, 1871 – October 18, 1905) was an English opera singer and actress, best known for her performances in soprano roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. Beginning as a child actress, she performed for two decades before falling ill on tour and dying at age 33.
Owen was born in Bristol, where she made her theatrical debut at the age of eleven.
In 1891, Owen joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company on tour, playing the small role of Cheetah in The Nautch Girl. She left the company to appear in a Christmas pantomime in Birmingham, returning to tour with the company in 1892 as Cynthia in The Vicar of Bray and as Polly in the companion piece, Captain Billy. Late in the tour, she played Nance in Arthur Sullivan's Haddon Hall.
In 1893, she continued to play Nance at the Savoy Theatre. She then created the parts of Rose in Jane Annie (1893, and on tour), Princess Nekaya in Gilbert and Sullivan's Utopia Limited (1893-94), Zerbinette in Mirette (1894), and Juanita in Sullivan's The Chieftain (1894-95, and on tour). She also filled in briefly in the title role in Mirette in July and August 1894. In 1895, she toured as Juanita and first as Lady Saphir, and then as the title character in Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience. When The Gondoliers replaced The Chieftain later in the tour, she added the role of Gianetta.

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Franz Schubert
Franz Peter Schubert (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁants ˈʃuːbɛɐ̯t]; 31 January 1797 – 19 November 1828) was an Austrian composer.
Although he died at the age of 31, Schubert was a prolific composer, having written some 600 Lieder, nine symphonies (including the famous "Unfinished Symphony"), liturgical music, operas, some incidental music, and a large body of chamber and solo piano music. Appreciation of Schubert's music during his lifetime was limited, but interest in his work increased significantly in the decades following his death. Franz Liszt, Robert Schumann, Johannes Brahms and Felix Mendelssohn, among others, discovered and championed his works in the 19th century. Today, Schubert is seen as one of the leading exponents of the early Romantic era in music and he remains one of the most frequently performed composers.
Schubert was born in Himmelpfortgrund (now a part of Alsergrund), Vienna, on 31 January 1797. His father, Franz Theodor Schubert, the son of a Moravian peasant, was a parish schoolmaster; his mother, Elisabeth Vietz, was the daughter of a Silesian master locksmith, and had also been a housemaid for a Viennese family prior to her marriage. Of Franz Theodor's fourteen children (one illegitimate child was born in 1783), nine died in infancy; five survived. Their father was a well-known teacher, and his school in Lichtental, a part of Vienna's 9th district, was well attended. He was not a musician of fame or with formal training, but he taught his son some elements of music.

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François Cellier
François Arsène Cellier (14 December 1849 – 5 January 1914), often called Frank, was an English conductor and composer. He is best known for his tenure as music director and conductor of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company during the original runs and early revivals of the Savoy operas.
Cellier was born in South Hackney, London to Arsène Cellier, a professor of languages from France, and his wife Mary Ann. He was a chorister at the Chapel Royal, St. James's, where his brother Alfred and Arthur Sullivan had also been choristers. His son was the West End theatre actor Frank Cellier.
François Cellier succeeded his brother Alfred as the resident conductor of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Opera Comique and then the Savoy Theatre from 1879 to 1902 during their initial runs and revivals (except that Sullivan usually conducted the first night of each) other than from July 1880 to April 1881, after Alfred returned from America. He also served as co-musical director at Richard D'Oyly Carte's Royal English Opera House for the runs of Ivanhoe and La Basoche in 1891–92. He conducted non-Sullivan Savoy Theatre pieces like Alexander Mackenzie's His Majesty and Ivan Caryll's The Lucky Star, and he also sometimes conducted for the company on tour.

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Furneaux Cook
Furneaux Cook (1839 – 19 January 1903), born John Furneaux Cook, was an English opera singer and actor best known for baritone roles in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan and Alfred Cellier on the London stage. Cook appeared on stage for over 30 years in London, the British provinces and America.
Cook was the brother of opera singer T. Aynsley Cook (1832–1894) and fellow Savoyard Alice Aynsley Cook (1849–1938).
One of Cook's earliest professional engagements was in the obscure Michael Balfe opera, Letty the Basketmaker, produced by John Hollingshead at the Gaiety Theatre in London in 1868. This was played as part of the same programme with W. S. Gilbert's burlesque Robert the Devil. Cook also played Peter the Watchman in the burlesque Cinderella the Younger (by Alfred Thompson, composed by E. Jonas) at the Gaiety in 1871, and the title character in The Sultan of Mocha, by Alfred Cellier, in Manchester in 1874-75.
Cook then joined one of Richard D'Oyly Carte's touring companies in 1878 in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Sorcerer, playing the vicar, Doctor Daly, and also Old Matthew in the curtain-raiser Breaking the Spell, by H. B. Farnie, based on Jacques Offenbach’s Le Violoneau. From 1879 to 1880, he travelled to America with Gilbert, Sullivan and the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company to present the authorised version of H.M.S. Pinafore, in which he played Dick Deadeye, and The Pirates of Penzance, in which he created the role of Samuel first in New York and then in Philadelphia, where he moved up to the larger roles of Sergeant of Police in Pirates and Captain Corcoran in Pinafore. He also played Dr. Daly on this tour. On April 23, 1880, the company gave a benefit for Cook consisting of Pinafore and the second act Pirates, in which Cook played Deadeye, Corcoran (apparently one in each act), and the Sergeant.

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Gaetano Donizetti
Domenico Gaetano Maria Donizetti (Italian pronunciation: [doˈmeːniko ɡaeˈtaːno maˈɾia doniˈdzetti]; 29 November 1797 – 8 April 1848) was an Italian composer from Bergamo, Lombardy. His best-known works are the operas L'elisir d'amore (1832), Lucia di Lammermoor (1835), and Don Pasquale (1843), all in Italian, and the French operas La favorite and La fille du régiment (both from 1840). Along with Vincenzo Bellini and Gioachino Rossini, he was a leading composer of bel canto opera.
The youngest of three sons, Donizetti was born in 1797 in Bergamo's Borgo Canale quarter located just outside the city walls. His family was very poor with no tradition of music, his father being the caretaker of the town pawnshop. Nevertheless, Donizetti received some musical instruction from Simon Mayr, a German composer of internationally successful operas who had become maestro di cappella at Bergamo's principal church in 1802.

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George Grossmith
George Grossmith (9 December 1847 – 1 March 1912) was an English comedian, writer, composer, actor, and singer. His performing career spanned more than four decades. As a writer and composer, he created 18 comic operas, nearly 100 musical sketches, some 600 songs and piano pieces, three books and both serious and comic pieces for newspapers and magazines.
Grossmith is best remembered for two aspects of his career. First, he created a series of nine memorable characters in the comic operas of Gilbert and Sullivan from 1877 to 1889, including Sir Joseph Porter, in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the Major-General in The Pirates of Penzance (1880) and Ko-Ko in The Mikado (1885–87). Second, he wrote, in collaboration with his brother Weedon, the 1892 comic novel Diary of a Nobody.
Grossmith was also famous in his day for performing his own comic piano sketches and songs, both before and after his Gilbert and Sullivan days, becoming the most popular British solo performer of the 1890s. Some of his comic songs endure today, including "See Me Dance the Polka". He continued to perform into the first decade of the 20th century. His son, George Grossmith, Jr., became a famous actor, playwright and producer of Edwardian musical comedies.

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George Sheringham
George Sheringham (13 November 1884 – 11 November 1937), was a British painter and theatre designer. One of the first recipients of the Royal Designers for Industry distinction in 1937, he is remembered for his work for the D’Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Sheringham was born in London, the son of an Anglican clergyman. He was educated at the King’s School, Gloucester, the Slade School of Art (1899–1901), and the Sorbonne, Paris (1904–06).
He first exhibited in Paris and later in Venice, Brussels, and Berlin. His one-man exhibitions included one in Paris in 1905, in London at the Ryder Gallery the same year, one in Melbourne, one in New York and seven more in London. He exhibited with the International Society from 1922.
Though best known as a stage designer and decorative artist, Sheringham also illustrated books by Max Beerbohm (including The Happy Hypocrite (1915)) and Edmond Rostand (La Princesse Lointaine, 1919). In 1917, he illustrated Canadian Wonder Tales by Cyrus MacMillan. In 1921, he collaborated with his brother Hugh on a book about fishing, The Book of the Fly Rod. He wrote Drawing in Pen and Pencil (1922), with James Laver, Design in the Theatre (1927). and with Rupert Mason and R. Boyd Morrison he edited Robes of Thespis, Costume Designs by Modern Artists (1928).

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Geraldine Ulmar
Geraldine Ulmar (June 23, 1862 – August 13, 1932) was an American singer and actress, best known for her performances in soprano roles of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Annie Geraldine Ulmar was born in Charlestown, Massachusetts. She began singing in amateur concerts before she was a teenager.
In 1879, she made her professional debut as Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore, by Gilbert and Sullivan, on a ship in a lake in Boston's Oakland Garden. She soon joined the Boston Ideal Opera Company and remained with the company as leading soprano for the next six years, singing roles in The Marriage of Figaro, The Bohemian Girl, Fra Diavolo, Giralda, The Chimes of Normandy, Fatinitza,Giroflé-Girofla,Czar and Carpenter, and in Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
Ulmar then was hired to play Yum-Yum in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's first American production of The Mikado, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York, from 1885 to 1886, in a cast that included George Thorne (Ko-Ko), Courtice Pounds (Nanki-Poo), and Fred Billington (Pooh-Bah). She joined a D'Oyly Carte touring company in England, singing Yum-Yum and Josephine for a few months before returning to America. D'Oyly Carte released her to play for John Stetson, the American manager, at the end of 1886, and she played in Carte-sanctioned productions of Princess Ida (in the title role) and The Mikado (as Yum-Yum) in New York and Patience in Boston (in the title role).

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Hamilton Clarke
James Hamilton Siree Clarke (25 January 1840 – 9 July 1912), better known as Hamilton Clarke, was an English conductor, composer and organist. Although Clarke was a prolific composer, he is best remembered as an associate of Arthur Sullivan, for whom he arranged music and compiled overtures for some of the Savoy Operas, including Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.
Clarke began as an organist, pianist and theatre conductor, becoming a musical director for Gilbert and Sullivan, among others. While conducting at London theatres, he also composed a tremendous volume of church music, organ solos, songs, operettas and orchestral works. Beginning in the late 1870s, he composed incidental music as musical director for many of Henry Irving's spectacular productions at the Lyceum Theatre. He also composed music for many of the German Reed Entertainments and conducted at many other London theatres in the 1870s and 1880s. Clark published a Manual of Orchestration and music criticism, as well as some fiction. In 1889, he took charge of the Victorian National Orchestra in Australia, returning to England in 1892 and soon becoming conductor of the Carl Rosa Opera Company for several years.

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Harold Abrahams
Harold Maurice Abrahams, CBE, (15 December 1899 – 14 January 1978) was a British athlete of Jewish origin. He was Olympic champion in 1924 in the 100 metres sprint, a feat depicted in the 1981 movie Chariots of Fire. Abrahams converted to Catholicism in 1934, and married D'Oyly Carte mezzo-soprano Sybil Evers in 1936.
Abrahams's father Isaac had emigrated to England from Russian Poland. He worked as a financier and settled in Bedford with his Welsh wife Ester. Harold was born in Bedford, and was the younger brother of another British athlete, the Olympic long jumper Sir Sidney Abrahams. Another brother, Sir Adolphe Abrahams, became the founder of British sport medicine.
Harold was educated at Bedford School, Repton School and then at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge from 1920 to 1924, before training as a lawyer. At Cambridge, he was a member of the Cambridge University Athletics Club (of which he was president 1922–1923),Cambridge University Liberal Club the Pitt Club, and the Gilbert and Sullivan Society. Before going to Cambridge he served as a lieutenant in the British Army.

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Harriett Everard
Harriett Everard (12 March 1844 – 22 February 1882) was an English singer and actress best known for creating the role of Little Buttercup in the Gilbert and Sullivan hit H.M.S. Pinafore. Her career was cut short by an onstage accident during a rehearsal, from which she never fully recovered.
Everard had a stage career of 20 years, although she died at the age of 37. She appeared in some of W. S. Gilbert's early plays before becoming part of Richard D'Oyly Carte's company at the Opera Comique, creating the role of Mrs. Partlett in The Sorcerer as well as the part of Little Buttercup.
Born Harriette Emily Woollams in Marylebone, Everard made her first stage appearance in Exeter, at the Theatre Royal, in 1860, and spent a number of years performing light opera, burlesque, comedy, and pantomime, both in the provinces and in London. In her early years she was cast in soubrette roles (the theatrical paper The Era described her as "sufficiently arch and saucy"), and in breeches roles in Christmas shows.

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Helen Carte
Helen Carte or Helen Lenoir (12 May 1852 – 5 May 1913) was the second wife of impresario and hotelier Richard D'Oyly Carte. She is best known for her stewardship of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and Savoy Hotel from the end of the 19th Century and into the early 20th century.
Born in Wigtown, Scotland, Helen attended the University of London from 1871 to 1874 and pursued brief teaching and acting careers. In 1875, she met Richard D'Oyly Carte and soon became his assistant and business manager. She helped produce all of the Gilbert and Sullivan and other Savoy Operas, beginning with The Sorcerer in 1877 and for the rest of her life, and helped Carte with all of his business interests. One of her principal assignments was to superintend arrangements for American productions and tours of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. Her grasp of detail and her diplomacy surpassed even Carte's.
Helen Lenoir married Richard D'Oyly Carte in 1888. During the 1890s, with Carte's health declining, Helen took greater and greater responsibility for the businesses, taking full control upon his death in 1901. She remarried in 1902 but continued to own the opera company and run most of the Carte business interests until her death, when they passed to her stepson, Rupert D'Oyly Carte. Although the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's operations decreased after Richard's death, Helen staged successful repertory seasons in London from 1906 to 1908, establishing that the Gilbert and Sullivan operas could continue to be revived profitably.

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Henry Lytton
Sir Henry Lytton (3 January 1865 – 15 August 1936) was an English actor and singer who was the leading exponent of the comic patter-baritone roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operas in the early part of the twentieth century. His career in these Savoy operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company spanned 50 years, and he is the only person ever knighted for achievements as a Gilbert and Sullivan performer.
Lytton began his career singing in operettas and plays, also doing odd jobs in the early 1880s. His wife, Louie Henri, performed with him and helped him get started in theatre, also serving as his music and acting coach. Lytton joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company on tour in 1884 and, after various tours, performed with the company at the Savoy Theatre in London in 1886 and 1887. After this, he played almost continuously with D'Oyly Carte touring companies for a decade as principal comedian, performing roles like Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore, Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance and Ko-Ko in The Mikado. He returned to the Savoy Theatre from 1897 to 1903, where he created a number of roles and played a large variety of roles with D'Oyly Carte, although not the principal comedian roles.

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Herman Klein
Herman Klein (23 July 1856 – 10 March 1934) was an English music critic, author and teacher of singing. Klein's famous brothers included Charles and Manuel Klein. His second wife was the writer Kathleen Clarice Louise Cornwell, and one of their children was the writer Denise Robins.
For thirteen years, Klein was a vocal teacher at the Guildhall School of Music in London, becoming a lifelong proponent of the methods of Manuel Garcia and helping to edit Garcia's book on the subject. In 1876 he took up musical journalism, writing for The Sunday Times from 1881–1901, among other publications. He also contributed prolifically to The Musical Times. From 1901 to 1909, Klein lived and taught singing in New York City, where he wrote for The New York Herald. He was one of the first critics to take notice of the gramophone and was appointed "musical adviser" to Columbia Records in 1906 in New York. He returned to England in 1909.
Klein wrote over half a dozen books about music and singers, as well as English translations of operas and art songs. He was a noted authority on Gilbert and Sullivan. In 1924 he began writing for The Gramophone and was in charge of operatic reviews, as well as contributing a monthly article on singing, from then until his death.

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Hugh Talbot
Hugh Talbot (c. 1845 – 31 October 1899) was an Irish tenor and actor best known for creating, to universally bad reviews, the role of Frederic in the Gilbert and Sullivan hit The Pirates of Penzance in the New York production.
Born Hugo Talbot Brennan near Dublin, Talbot was a choirboy as a youth. He travelled to Italy to study music, where he debuted on stage in Milan in Giuseppe Verdi's Rigoletto. For several seasons thereafter, he sang with Adelina Patti and Christine Nilsson in Italy, Russia and France. After returning to England, he sang opera in Italian, which was unusual at that time. With Her Majesty's Opera, he sang Don José in the English première of Carmen and also played the leading roles in Faust, Il Trovatore and others.
In the autumn of 1879, Richard D'Oyly Carte sent one of his theatrical companies to play the first authorized production H.M.S. Pinafore in America, and the company also prepared for the opening of the next Gilbert and Sullivan Opera, The Pirates of Penzance, which was to be premièred in New York. Pinafore opened at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City, on December 1, 1879, and Talbot was cast in the leading tenor role of Ralph Rackstraw. The opening night review of Pinafore in The New York Times noted, "The Ralph Rackstraw, Mr. Hugh Talbot, has a light, pleasant tenor voice, which was not thoroughly under his control last evening, and he is also the best actor who has appeared here in the character".

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Ian Bradley
Ian Campbell Bradley (born 28 May 1950) is a British academic, author, theologian, Church of Scotland minister, journalist and broadcaster. At the University of St Andrews, he is Reader in Practical Theology and Church History and a University chaplain. He is also the Associate Minister of Holy Trinity Church, St Andrews.
He has researched and written widely on religious matters, from Celtic Christianity to the theology of sacrifice and the future of spirituality in Britain. In addition, he has published works on the subjects of hymnody, monarchy, the Victorian era, Gilbert and Sullivan and musical theatre.
Ian Bradley was born in Berkhamsted, Hertfordshire on Whit Sunday 1950. He grew up in the southeast of England and was educated at Tonbridge School and New College, Oxford, from which he graduated with a first-class honours degree in modern history. He remained at University of Oxford to complete a doctoral thesis on religion and politics in early nineteenth-century Britain, earning his DPhil degree.

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Isaac Asimov
Isaac Asimov (/ˈaɪzək ˈæzɨməv/ EYE-zək AZ-i-məv; born Isaak Yudovich Ozimov, Russian: Исаак Юдович Озимов; Yiddish: אייזיק יודאָוויטש אסימאוו; c. January 2, 1920 – April 6, 1992) was an American author and professor of biochemistry at Boston University, best known for his works of science fiction and for his popular science books. Asimov was one of the most prolific writers of all time, having written or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards. His works have been published in all ten major categories of the Dewey Decimal System (although his only work in the 100s—which covers philosophy and psychology—was a foreword for The Humanist Way).
Asimov is widely considered a master of hard science fiction and, along with Robert A. Heinlein and Arthur C. Clarke, he was considered one of the "Big Three" science fiction writers during his lifetime. Asimov's most famous work is the Foundation Series; his other major series are the Galactic Empire series and the Robot series, both of which he later tied into the same fictional universe as the Foundation Series to create a unified "future history" for his stories much like those pioneered by Robert A. Heinlein and previously produced by Cordwainer Smith and Poul Anderson. He wrote many short stories, among them "Nightfall", which in 1964 was voted by the Science Fiction Writers of America the best short science fiction story of all time. Asimov wrote the Lucky Starr series of juvenile science-fiction novels using the pen name Paul French.

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Isidore Godfrey
Isidore Godfrey (27 September 1900 – 12 September 1977) was musical director of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company for 39 years, from 1929 to 1968. He conducted most of the company's performances during that period, except for a few London seasons when Malcolm Sargent was guest conductor and brief periods in the summers of 1947 and 1948 when Boyd Neel filled in as guest conductor.
Godfrey led the company in numerous tours, both domestic and foreign, during his tenure, and he conducted most of the company's recordings over that long period.
Godfrey was born in London and educated at Haberdashers' Aske's Boys' School. He studied the piano under George Woodhouse, a pupil of Theodor Leschetizky, and in 1914 made a public appearance, at the age of 13, playing in a joint recital at the Bechstein Hall given by Woodhouse's pupils. Godfrey subsequently trained at the Guildhall School of Music, where he won prizes for ensemble playing, the Gold Medal for piano and the annual Mercers' Scholarship. While still a student, he performed as an accompanist in London.

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Jean Hindmarsh
Jean Hindmarsh (born 1932) is a retired singer and actress. She is best known as a principal soprano with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the 1950s and 1960s.
HIndmarsh was born in Leeds and educated at Lawnswood High School. There, she was prominent in the school's musical and theatrical productions, including Merrie England in 1950, in which she played Sir Walter Raleigh. Hindmarsh gained her teaching diploma (ARMCM) from the Royal College of Music in Manchester and then continued to study opera for an additional 18 months. She played the lead in two college productions and sang in concerts and oratorios. Hindmarsh was the runner-up in the first Kathleen Ferrier Competition in 1955 and won the Blackpool heat against 97 competitors. A representative from the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company heard her performance and invited her to audition.
Hindmarsh was engaged by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in March 1956 as principal soprano. Over the next four years, she played the title role in Princess Ida, Mabel in The Pirates of Penzance, Elsie Maynard in The Yeomen of the Guard, Gianetta in The Gondoliers and Josephine in HMS Pinafore, soon adding the small role of Lady Ella in Patience. In 1959, she began instead to play the title role in Patience. Hindmarsh married in 1960 and left the D'Oyly Carte organisation when she was expecting her first child. She rejoined the Company as a guest artist in her old roles for seasons in 1961–62, 1962–63, in the spring of 1963, 1963–64, and in the spring of 1969. These included two London seasons, one provincial tour and one American tour. In reviewing Princess Ida in 1961, The Times wrote that, in the title role, "Hindmarsh charms, amuses and... moves the audience". That paper commented on a 1962 performance of The Gondoliers: "Outstanding among last night's cast was Miss Jean Hindmarsh, a winning Giannetta both in appearance and voice."

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Jeffrey Skitch
Jeffrey Ralph Skitch (born in 1927) is a retired teacher, actor and operatic baritone best known for his performances and recordings with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1952 to 1965.
Born in Australia, Skitch moved with his mother to England when he was two years old. Skitch served in the RAF during World War II and began acting by 1949. After his career with D'Oyly Carte, he turned to teaching, and from 1981 to 1992 he was the Principal of Elmhurst Ballet School.
Skitch was born in Millicent, South Australia, the son of Ralph Aubrey Skitch (1896–1959), a land agent, and Magda Katie Helena Herman (1897–1959), who met in London during the First World War. The couple married in Australia in about 1920. In 1929, Skitch and his older brother Robert Ernest (1923–1999) travelled with their mother on a visit to London and did not return to Australia. His parents divorced, and his father remained in Australia, later remarrying. Skitch was educated in England. After National Service with the Royal Air Force, he trained as an actor and singer at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art and The Old Vic Theatre School.

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Jessie Bond
Jessie Bond (10 January 1853 – 17 June 1942) was an English singer and actress best known for creating the mezzo-soprano soubrette roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas. She spent twenty years on the stage, the bulk of them with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Musical from an early age, Bond began a concert singing career in Liverpool by 1870. At the age of 17, she entered into a brief, unhappy marriage. After leaving her abusive husband, she continued her concert career and studied at the Royal Academy of Music in London with such famous singing teachers as Manuel García.
At the age of 25, in 1878, Bond began her theatrical career, creating the role of Cousin Hebe in Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore, which became an international success. After this, she created roles of increasing importance with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in a series of successful comic operas, including the title role in Iolanthe (1882), Pitti Sing in The Mikado (1885), Mad Margaret in Ruddigore (1887), Phoebe in The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), Tessa in The Gondoliers (1889) and others.

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Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II (October 25, 1825 – June 3, 1899), also known as Johann Baptist Strauss or Johann Strauss, Jr., the Younger, or the Son (German: Sohn), was an Austrian composer of light music, particularly dance music and operettas. He composed over 500 waltzes, polkas, quadrilles, and other types of dance music, as well as several operettas and a ballet. In his lifetime, he was known as "The Waltz King", and was largely then responsible for the popularity of the waltz in Vienna during the 19th century.
Strauss was born in St. Ulrich (now a part of Neubau), the son of Johann Strauss I, another composer of dance music. His father did not wish him to become a composer, but rather a banker; however, the son defied his father's wishes, and went on to study music with the composer Joseph Drechsler and the violin with Anton Kollmann, the ballet répétiteur of the Vienna Court Opera. Strauss had two younger brothers, Josef and Eduard Strauss, who became composers of light music as well, although they were never as well known as their elder brother.

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John Ayldon
John Ayldon (born December 11, 1943) is an English opera singer, best known for his performances in bass-baritone roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
John Ayldon was born as John Arnold in London. His parents moved the family to San Francisco, California in 1954, where he went to school. He became interested in the theatre, appearing in many school productions (including some Gilbert and Sullivan) and received some professional engagements, including appearing on television in the title role of Huckleberry Finn, before returning to England in 1958, where he joined the Eltham Little Theatre, performing in Gilbert and Sullivan shows. For the next several years, he worked in journalism, shipping and advertising.
Ayldon joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company as a member of the chorus in 1967. The following season, he began to play the small role of the Associate in Trial by Jury and filled in on occasion as Sergeant Bouncer in Cox and Box, the Learned Judge in Trial, and the Boatswain in H.M.S. Pinafore. In 1968, he began to understudy Donald Adams in the principal bass-baritone roles, appearing on occasion as Dick Deadeye in Pinafore, the Pirate King in The Pirates of Penzance, the Earl of Mountararat in Iolanthe, and the title role in The Mikado.

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John Hollingshead
John Hollingshead (9 September 1827 – 9 October 1904) was an English theatrical impresario, journalist and writer during the latter half of the 19th century. He is best remembered as the first manager of the Gaiety Theatre, London. An innovative producer, Hollingshead brought Gilbert and Sullivan together in 1871 to produce their first joint work, a musical extravaganza called Thespis.
Hollingshead was born in Hoxton, London, the son of Henry Randall Hollingshead. He was educated at Homerton. He first worked as a bookkeeper for a soft goods company in London in the early 1850s while publishing political essays on finance and social reform. He soon entered into a partnership as a clothing merchant. During this time, Hollingshead and his friend Moy Thomas began publishing a penny paper called The Mail that proved unsuccessful. In 1854, he decided to close his clothing business and begin working as a writer full time. By 1855, Hollingshead was married with two children. He died in London at the age of 77.

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John Major
Sir John Major, KG, CH, PC, ACIB (born 29 March 1943) is a British Conservative politician, who served as Prime Minister of the United Kingdom and Leader of the Conservative Party from 1990 to 1997. He held the posts of Foreign Secretary and Chancellor of the Exchequer in the Cabinet of Margaret Thatcher and was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Huntingdon from 1979 to 2001.
Despite Thatcher's "notorious" assertion that "she expected to continue in control as a backseat driver," Major's mild and consensual style was seen as complete contrast to Thatcher's forceful and confrontational manner. Early in his term, he presided over British participation in the First Gulf War (March 1991) and negotiated "Game, Set and Match for Britain" at the Maastricht Treaty (December 1991). Despite the British economy then being in recession he led the Conservatives to a fourth consecutive election victory, winning the most votes in British electoral history in the 1992 general election, albeit with a much reduced majority in the House of Commons. He is to date, the last Conservative leader to win an outright majority in a general election.

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Joyce Wright
Joyce Wright (born 23 June 1922) is an English singer and actress, best known for her performances in the mezzo-soprano roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. She was married for a time to another D'Oyly Carte performer, Peter Pratt.
Joyce Wright was born in Leicester, England. She grew up in Glasgow, Scotland, where she was educated at Bearsden Academy and received musical training from the age of eight. When she and her family returned to the Midlands, she won several prizes at the Midlands' Musical Festivals and sang in various choirs under the direction of Sir Malcolm Sargent and Ernest Nash. She also performed in amateur theatricals, including with the Glasgow Players. Wright also played the piano professionally for a dance orchestra.
Wright joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company chorus in June 1947. Soon thereafter, she began to play the roles of Leila in Iolanthe and Peep-Bo in The Mikado, and filled in on occasion as Edith in The Pirates of Penzance and Lady Saphir in Patience. In 1948, she added a number of small roles and filled in briefly as Hebe in H.M.S. Pinafore, Edith in Pirates, Phoebe Meryll in The Yeomen of the Guard, and Tessa in The Gondoliers. She continued to play her small roles and to substitute in these larger roles, also filling in as Pitti-Sing in The Mikado, until 1951.

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Judy Garland
Judy Garland (June 10, 1922 – June 22, 1969) was an American actress, singer and vaudevillian. Renowned for her contralto voice, she attained international stardom through a career that spanned 45 of her 47 years as an actress in musical and dramatic roles, as a recording artist and on the concert stage. Respected for her versatility, she received a Juvenile Academy Award and won a Golden Globe Award, as well as Grammy Awards and a Special Tony Award. She was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Actress for her role in the remake of A Star is Born and for Best Supporting Actress for her performance in the 1961 film, Judgment at Nuremberg. At 39 years of age, she remains the youngest recipient of the Cecil B. DeMille Award for lifetime achievement in the motion picture industry.
After appearing in vaudeville with her two older sisters, Garland was signed to Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer as a teenager. There she made more than two dozen films, including nine with Mickey Rooney and the 1939 film with which she would be most identified, The Wizard of Oz. After 15 years, she was released from the studio but gained renewed success through record-breaking concert appearances, including a return to acting beginning with critically acclaimed performances.

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Kurt Gänzl
Kurt Gänzl (born 15 February 1946) is an award-winning writer, musicologist, casting director and singer best known for his books about musical theatre.
After a long acting and singing career and a career as a casting director of West End shows, Gänzl has become one of the world's most important chroniclers of the history of musical theatre. According to Canal Académie, "Kurt Gänzl is an institution. No one interested in musicals and operetta can ignore that. He is the world reference – with some few others, like Gerald Bordman, Ken Bloom, or Andrew Lamb – for that subject".
Gänzl was born Brian Roy Gallas in Wellington, New Zealand and is of Austrian descent, the son of Frederick, an educator, and Nancy Gallas, née Welsh. He studied law and classics at University of Canterbury in New Zealand, receiving a masters degree in 1967 while performing as a radio and concert vocalist.
Early in his career, Gänzl wrote plays. His one-act plays Elektra and The Women of Troy were produced in New Zealand in 1966 and 1967 by Elmwood Players. The latter play won the British Drama League (now British Theatre Association/Drama Magazine) award in 1967. The next year, Ganzl joined the New Zealand Opera Company as a bass soloist. After the company closed, he moved to London and studied for a year at the London Opera Centre. For twenty years, he worked as a performer, including a long run in London's hit show, The Black and White Minstrels. His last show was Harold Fielding's Hans Andersen at the London Palladium. He then worked as a talent agent and as a casting director for over a dozen musicals and plays in London's West End theatres and for musical and operatic productions in Europe and America.

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Leo Sheffield
Leo Sheffield (15 November 1873 – 3 September 1951) was an English singer and actor best known for his performances in baritone roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
He made his first stage appearances under the direction of W. S. Gilbert in 1906, remaining with the D'Oyly Carte company for three years. After touring in musical theatre for the next five years with other managements, he rejoined D'Oyly Carte from 1915 to 1928 in the principal baritone roles, appearing in London seasons and on tour in Britain and, in one of his last seasons, Canada. He recorded many of these roles.
After leaving D'Oyly Carte, Sheffield worked in a wide variety of theatre, including musical comedy, straight plays, pantomime, and in radio and films. He continued to tour during World War II while in his seventies.
Sheffield was born Leo Wilson in Malton, Yorkshire. Two of his brothers, Thorpe and Wilson Sheffield, appeared with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the 1890s.
Sheffield joined D'Oyly Carte in 1906, appearing at the Savoy Theatre under the direction of W. S. Gilbert in the first repertory season of Savoy Operas. During this season, he played the roles of Second Yeoman and then Lieutenant of the Tower in The Yeomen of the Guard, and Annibale and later Luiz in The Gondoliers. From 1907 to 1909, he toured with D'Oyly Carte, playing the Counsel for the Plaintiff in Trial by Jury, Boatswain in H.M.S. Pinafore, Samuel in The Pirates of Penzance, Archibald Grosvenor in Patience, Strephon in Iolanthe, Arac in Princess Ida, Pish-Tush in The Mikado, Sergeant Meryll in Yeomen, and Luiz. In the second repertory season at the Savoy, from April 1908 to March 1909, he played Pish-Tush, the Boatswain, Private Willis in Iolanthe, Samuel, Luiz and the Lieutenant, and Owen Rhys in A Welsh Sunset a short sentimental piece which was given as a curtain raiser.

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Leon Major
Leon Major (born 1933, Toronto) is a Canadian opera and theatre director. He is the Artistic Director of The Maryland Opera Studio for the University of Maryland, College Park. From 1998 - 2003 he was Artistic Director of Boston Lyric Opera and from 2003–2007 he was artistic consultant for Opera Cleveland.
He has directed opera and theatre throughout the Americas and Europe for companies that include: New York City Opera, Washington Opera,Glimmerglass Opera, San Diego Opera, Vancouver Opera, Teatro Municipale (Rio de Janeiro), The Opera Company of Philadelphia, Florentine Opera, Austin Lyric Opera, Wolf Trap Opera Company, the Canadian Opera Company and The Opera Festival of New Jersey.
Among the productions he has directed are: Macbeth, Falstaff, Intermezzo, Volpone, Don Pasquale, Don Carlos, Resurrection, Aida, Don Giovanni, Roméo et Juliette, La traviata, L'elisir d'amore, Carmen (on Boston Common) Eugene Onegin, The Aspern Papers, Cosi fan tutte, Il barbiere di Siviglia, and Peter Grimes. Of his New York City Opera production, the New York Times said: "Falstaff [was] directed with vitality and imagination by Leon Major." His 1981 Stratford Shakespeare Festival production of H.M.S. Pinafore was later presented for broadcast on television.

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Leslie Rands
Leslie Rands (January 7, 1900–December 6, 1972) was an English opera singer, best known for his performances in baritone roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. He married D'Oyly Carte soprano Marjorie Eyre in 1926.
Leslie Rands was born in Chichester, England. He performed in the Chichester Cathedral choir and studied at the Royal School of Music before joining the D'Oyly Carte touring company in 1925 as a chorister. In 1926 he played Cox in Cox and Box, Samuel in The Pirates of Penzance, Sir Richard Cholmondeley, the Lieutenant of the Tower, in The Yeomen of the Guard, and Giuseppe (or, occasionally, Luiz) in The Gondoliers. In 1927, he added the role of Pish-Tush in The Mikado to his repertoire.
Beginning in 1928 Rands played the principal baritone parts of Counsel to the Plaintiff and later the Learned Judge in Trial by Jury, Doctor Daly in The Sorcerer, Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore, occasionally the Pirate king in Pirates, Archibald Grosvenor (and occasionally Colonel) in Patience, Strephon in Iolanthe, Florian in Princess Ida, Pish-Tush, Cholmondeley and Giuseppe.

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Letty Lind
Letitia Elizabeth Rudge, better known as Letty Lind (21 December 1861 - 27 August 1923), was an English actress, dancer and acrobat, best known for her work in burlesque at the Gaiety Theatre, and in musical theatre at Daly's Theatre, in London.
Lind was born at her parents' residence in Birmingham, England, and was christened at Saint Thomas church. Her father, Henry Rudge, was a brass founder and chandelier maker. Her mother, Elizabeth Rudge, was an actress whose career was brief and confined mostly to the Birmingham area. Lind was one of the Rudge Sisters, all of whom became well known performers. Lind also had two brothers who were brass founders.
Lind first appeared on stage when she was about five years old as Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin, then toured with American entertainer and writer Howard Paul (1830 - 1905) and his British wife from about the age of ten. The Pauls billed her as "La Petite Letitia." Howard Paul became Lind's lover and fathered two illegitimate children by her: a girl who died in infancy (1878) and a son (Henry Horace Howard Paul Rudge, b. 1880). Lind made her first London appearance under the name "Letty Lind" in Howard Paul's farce, Locked Out at the Princess's Theatre in 1879. In 1881, Lind left Paul's company. It is not clear exactly when their relationship ended, but Paul married Florence Kate Arthur in 1889.

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Lewis Carroll
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson ( /ˈtʃɑrlz ˈlʌtwɪdʒ ˈdɒdʒsən/ CHARLZ LUDT-wij DOJ-sən; 27 January 1832 – 14 January 1898), better known by the pseudonym Lewis Carroll (/ˈkærəl/ KARR-əl), was an English author, mathematician, logician, Anglican deacon and photographer. His most famous writings are Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and its sequel Through the Looking-Glass, as well as the poems "The Hunting of the Snark" and "Jabberwocky", all examples of the genre of literary nonsense. He is noted for his facility at word play, logic, and fantasy, and there are societies dedicated to the enjoyment and promotion of his works and the investigation of his life in many parts of the world, including the United Kingdom, Japan, the United States, and New Zealand.
Dodgson's family was predominantly northern English, with Irish connections. Conservative and High Church Anglican, most of Dodgson's ancestors were army officers or Church of England clergy. His great-grandfather, also named Charles Dodgson, had risen through the ranks of the church to become the Bishop of Elphin. His grandfather, another Charles, had been an army captain, killed in action in Ireland in 1803 when his two sons were hardly more than babies. His mother's name was Frances Jane Lutwidge.

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Louie René
Louie René (c. 1872 - 9 March 1955) was an English singer and actress best remembered for her performances with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the Gilbert and Sullivan contralto roles at the turn of the 20th century.
René performed with D'Oyly Carte touring companies from 1894 to 1903, except for one year, playing the principal contralto roles of the Savoy operas. For most of the period between 1906 and 1914, both in London and on tour, she served as the company's principal contralto, playing the roles of Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, Ruth in The Pirates of Penzance and Katisha in The Mikado, among others. After this, she pursued a career in Edwardian musical comedy.
Born in London, René appeared in 1892–93 with a touring company in The Mountebanks by W. S. Gilbert. The Era commented that she "sings and plays Ultrice in admirable style". She joined a D'Oyly Carte Opera Company touring company in March 1894, immediately playing the principal role of Lady Sophy in Utopia, Limited. The Era commented, "Miss Louie René is seen to great advantage as Lady Sophy." In December of that year, she began to play the role of Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore, on tour, as well as Lady Sophy.

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Louisa May Alcott
Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist best known as author of the novel Little Women and its sequels Little Men and Jo's Boys. Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May Alcott and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau. Nevertheless, her family suffered severe financial difficulties and Alcott worked to help support the family from an early age. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard.
Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today. Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist. She never married and died in Boston.

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Maggie Moore
Maggie Moore (10 April 1851 - March 15, 1926) was an American-Australian actress born as Margaret Virginia Sullivan. She met and married producer J. C. Williamson in the U.S. and became popular as an actress in their production of Struck Oil, which premiered in 1873 and was revived many times. Soon after their marriage, they took the play on a tour of Australia. It was such a success that they stayed there, where he founded the most successful theatrical company in Australia, and she became a leading actress.
Moore was also successful in Williamson's Gilbert and Sullivan operas, other operetta productions, and other stage pieces. She continued a busy acting career in Australia and on tour worldwide, ending her marriage with Williamson and later marrying actor Henry ("Harry") R. Roberts. She finally retired in 1925 and moved to San Francisco.
Sullivan was born at San Francisco, U.S.A., in 1851, and began her theatrical career at an early age. She established a local reputation, and having married J. C. Williamson came with him to Australia in 1874. They opened in Melbourne on 1 August in Struck Oil and were immediately successful. Some weeks later they went to Sydney and, after touring Australia, to India. In 1876 Struck Oil played for 100 nights at the Adelphi Theatre, London, and was followed for a similar period by Arrah-na-Pogue, with Williamson as Shaun and his wife as Arrah. Other appearances were made in the provinces, and a successful visit was then paid to the United States.

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Malcolm Sargent
Sir Harold Malcolm Watts Sargent (29 April 1895 – 3 October 1967) was an English conductor, organist and composer widely regarded as Britain's leading conductor of choral works. The musical ensembles with which he was associated included the Ballets Russes, the Huddersfield Choral Society, the Royal Choral Society, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, and the London Philharmonic, Hallé, Liverpool Philharmonic, BBC Symphony and Royal Philharmonic orchestras. Sargent was held in high esteem by choirs and instrumental soloists, but because of his high standards and a statement that he made in a 1936 interview disputing musicians' rights to tenure, his relationship with orchestral players was often uneasy. Despite this, he was co-founder of the London Philharmonic, was the first conductor of the Liverpool Philharmonic as a full-time ensemble, and played an important part in saving the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra from disbandment in the 1960s.
As chief conductor of London's internationally famous summer music festival the Proms from 1948 to 1967, Sargent was one of the best-known English conductors. When he took over the Proms from their founder, Sir Henry Wood, he and two assistants conducted the two-month season between them. By the time he died, he was assisted by a large international roster of guest conductors.

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Marjorie Eyre
Marjorie Eyre (1897 – 3 December 1987) was an English opera singer, best known for her performances in the soprano and mezzo-soprano roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. She married another D'Oyly Carte performer, Leslie Rands, in 1926.
Marjorie Eyre-Parker was born in Derby, England and studied at the Royal College of Music.
She joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company as a chorister in 1924, also appearing in the small part of Giulia in The Gondoliers. In 1925, she took over her first major role, Yum-Yum in The Mikado, and two more small ones, Lady Ella in Patience and Celia (and also Phyllis, briefly) in Iolanthe. In 1926, she took over the title role in Patience, Rose Maybud in Ruddigore and Gianetta The Gondoliers. In 1928, Eyre continued playing these principal soprano roles (sometimes sharing them), but after the 1928–29 North American tour, Rupert D'Oyly Carte decided to assign mezzo-soprano roles to her.
In 1929, Eyre studied with a voice teacher to lower her range to prepare for her new assignments and became the company's principal soubrette, playing Cousin Hebe in H.M.S. Pinafore, Edith in The Pirates of Penzance, Saphir in Patience, the title role in Iolanthe, Pitti-Sing in The Mikado, Mad Margaret in Ruddigore, and Tessa in The Gondoliers. She gave up the latter four roles from October 1929 to May 1930, when the popular Nellie Briercliffe rejoined the company for the London season, but Eyre added Constance in The Sorcerer at the same time.

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Martyn Green
William Martyn-Green (22 April 1899 – 8 February 1975), better known as Martyn Green, was an English actor and singer. He is best known for his work as principal comedian in the Gilbert & Sullivan comic operas, which he performed and recorded with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company and other troupes.
After army service in World War I, Green studied singing and began to perform in musical theatre. In 1922, he joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company playing in the chorus and in a variety of smaller roles, while understudying, and often substituting for, the company's principal comedian. Beginning in 1931, he was regularly given the roles of Major-General Stanley in The Pirates of Penzance and Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore. In 1934, Green became the principal comedian, playing all the famous Gilbert and Sullivan patter roles, including Sir Joseph in H.M.S. Pinafore, the Major-General in Pirates, Bunthorne in Patience, the Lord Chancellor in Iolanthe, Ko-Ko in The Mikado, Jack Point in The Yeomen of the Guard and the Duke of Plaza Toro in The Gondoliers, among others.

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Matt Damon
Matthew Paige "Matt" Damon (born October 8, 1970) is an American actor, screenwriter, and philanthropist whose career was launched following the success of the film Good Will Hunting (1997) from a screenplay he co-wrote with friend Ben Affleck. The pair won an Academy Award for Best Original Screenplay and a Golden Globe Award for Best Screenplay for their work. Damon alone received multiple Best Actor nominations, including an Academy Award for his lead performance in the film.
Damon has since starred in commercially successful films such as Saving Private Ryan (1998), the Ocean's trilogy, and the Bourne series, while also gaining critical acclaim for his performances in dramas such as Syriana (2005), The Good Shepherd (2006), and The Departed (2006). He garnered a Golden Globe nomination for portraying the title character in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999) and was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor in Invictus (2009). He is one of the top 40 highest grossing actors of all time. In 2007, Damon received a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and was named Sexiest Man Alive by People magazine. Damon has been actively involved in charitable work, including the ONE Campaign, H2O Africa Foundation, and Water.org.

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Meston Reid
Alexander Meston Reid (21 March 1945 – 31 October 1993), better known as Meston Reid, was a Scottish opera singer, best known for his performances in tenor roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Meston Reid was born in Royal Deeside, Aberdeenshire, Scotland. He began his musical career as a boy soprano. At the age of eighteen, he joined the Lyric Musical Society of Aberbeen, and also sang with the Inverness Opera Company. He made his professional debut at the Tivoli Theatre, Aberdeen, in a Scottish variety show, then sang with Sadler's Wells Opera for four years, first in the chorus before graduating to small parts. His first solo role was Lun Tha in The King and I in 1972. In 1973 he appeared in The Leslie Crowther Show, Lilac Time, and later that year was Sid-el-Karr in The Desert Song.
Reid joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1974, singing Earl Tolloller in Iolanthe. He soon added the roles of Mr. Box in Cox and Box, Alexis Poindextre in The Sorcerer, Ralph Rackstraw in H.M.S. Pinafore, the Duke of Dunstable in Patience, Richard Dauntless in Ruddigore, and Marco Palmieri in The Gondoliers. When Utopia Limited was revived for the 1975 Centenary season, Reid played the role of Captain Fitzbattleaxe. In 1975, also, Reid added Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance and Leonard Meryll in The Yeomen of the Guard to his repertoire. He added Prince Hilarion in Princess Ida when that opera was revived in February 1977. In 1977, he played the role of Ralph in the Royal Command Performance of Pinafore at Windsor Castle to celebrate Queen Elizabeth's Silver Jubilee. He continued to play principal tenor roles with the company until it closed in 1982.

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Michael Heyland
Michael Heyland is a retired stage director and actor, and an arts and events consultant in England. He was Director of Productions of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1969–78. Later, he was an arts and events consultant for many organizations and managed the Royal Choral Society for sixteen years, among other projects. As an actor and voice actor, he has appeared on radio, TV and in films.
Heyland was born in Calcutta, where his father was stationed in the British army. studied both music and drama at Guildhall School of Music & Drama, London. He began his career working in repertory, including A Christmas Carol at Theatre Royal, Stratford East and Brecht's Happy End at the Royal Court Theatre, London.
He was engaged as Director of Productions of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1969 to 1978. He directed the company's television recording of H.M.S. Pinafore in 1973. He also directed new productions of The Sorcerer (1971), which had not been produced professionally in Britain since 1940 and revived Utopia, Limited (1975), which had not been revived by the company for over 70 years, at the Savoy Theatre for the company's centennial celebration. In 1977, he restaged Iolanthe, which later toured Australia and New Zealand. He also restaged the Act 2 finale of Ruddigore and the opening chorus of Patience.

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Nellie Briercliffe
Nellie Briercliffe (1889 – 12 December 1966) was an English singer and actress best known for her performances in the mezzo-soprano roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
After playing in the provinces early in her career, Briercliffe joined the D'Oyly Carte, touring for over three years in the Gilbert and Sullivan soubrette roles. She left the company to play in London's the West End, but rejoined D'Oyly Carte for their 1919–20 London season. After this, she played on the West End in musicals and comic plays, with a three year hiatus from 1924 to 1927, until she finally retired in 1931. She recorded seven of her D'Oyly Carte roles.
Briercliffe was born in Bolton, the daughter of Robert Briercliffe and his wife. She performed extensively in the British provinces before making her debut in London. In December 1913, she appeared at the Haymarket Theatre in a curtain-raiser, A Dear Little Wife. She also sang in the concert hall.
She joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in October 1914 after Rupert D'Oyly Carte saw her performance at the Haymarket and "was much struck by her vivacity". She was cast immediately in the principal soubrette roles of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas as follows: Hebe in H.M.S. Pinafore, Edith in The Pirates of Penzance, Angela in Patience, Iolanthe in Iolanthe, Melissa in Princess Ida, Pitti-Sing in The Mikado, Phoebe in The Yeomen of the Guard and Tessa in The Gondoliers. When The Sorcerer was revived in 1916, she added the role of Constance. Briercliffe "quickly established herself as a favorite with London audiences" and toured constantly with the company for more than three years.

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Patricia Leonard
Patricia Leonard (9 March 1936 – 28 January 2010) was an English opera singer, best known for her performances in mezzo-soprano and contralto roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
After working as a secretary, Leonard turned to singing in concerts and on the radio. She began to sing opera, first with Sadler's Wells Opera, and joined the D'Oyly Carte in 1972. There she moved up from chorister to small-role player, understudying larger roles, taking on the major mezzo-soprano role of Mad Margaret in Ruddigore in 1975. In 1977, she took over as the company's principal contralto, playing ten of these leading roles with the company until its closure in 1982. She married Michael Buchan (né Michael Fox), who joined D'Oyly Carte with her and performed frequently with her in later years.
In later years, she continued to perform in Gilbert and Sullivan operas with various opera companies and with the group Gilbert and Sullivan for All. She also returned to singing in concerts, including oratorios, opera pieces and other classical works, including in a series of The Proms evenings with the National Concert Orchestra, as well as operetta, musical theatre and music hall. She appeared on BBC broadcasts and in plays, films and commercials until about 2008 and gave singing lessons.

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Pauline Rita
Pauline Rita (c.1842 – 28 June 1920) was an English soprano and actress. During her early career, she was best known known for her performances in operettas and comic operas at the Opera Comique and was associated with impresario Richard D'Oyly Carte. Later, she married flautist John Radcliff, and the two performed together for many years.
In 1872, Rita took part in a joint recital with Charles Santley at St James's Hall, London. In the same year she sang in Handel's oratorio Athalia in Glasgow, where the local critic was unimpressed: "Mdlle. Rita has a voice nearly always in tune, but of a shrill and unsympathetic quality, and she indulges from time to time in that fatal vibrato to which we have so often objected." In 1874, she performed in Richard D'Oyly Carte's light opera company at the Opera Comique, in The Broken Branch, an English version of Gaston Serpette's La branch cassée, in which she received better notices: "Madame Pauline Rita has achieved a triumph in her first appearance on the stage. She possesses a voice of singular flexibility, acts well, and looks attractive." In December 1874 she played the lead role of the Prince de Conti in Charles Lecocq's Les Prés St. Gervais at the Criterion Theatre. The following year, she starred in the title role, Clairette Angot, in a revival of Lecocq's La fille de Madame Angot at the Opera Comique, which replaced La Périchole on the bill with Trial by Jury. In October of that year she appeared as Barbara in Alfred Cellier's The Tower of London at the Prince's Theatre, Manchester.

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Pauline Wales
Pauline Wales (b. 1938) is an English singer and actress best known for her performances in the mezzo-soprano roles of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Wales was born at Stockton-on-Tees, England to a musical family, and she showed an interest in singing early on. She joined the Stockton Stage Society, where she played the soubrette lead in musical theatre productions such as The New Moon, The Maid of the Mountains, The Student Prince and The Vagabond King. Early in her career, Wales performed in oratorio and musical theatre in the north of England. She joined the chorus of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1959.
During her early years with the company, Wales performed the small roles of Isabel in The Pirates of Penzance, Leila in Iolanthe, and occasionally Cousin Hebe in H.M.S. Pinafore, and Vittoria in The Gondoliers. In 1961, when the company revived Princess Ida, Wales added the larger role of Melissa to her repertoire. She also occasionally performed the role of Phoebe Meryll in The Yeomen of the Guard. By 1963, she was singing Hebe in Pinafore and Vittoria in The Gondoliers full time and occasionally Lady Saphir in Patience, Pitti-Sing in The Mikado and Tessa in The Gondoliers. After Gillian Humphreys left the company in 1965, Wales also took over the roles of Kate in Pirates, Saphir in Patience, and Peep-Bo in The Mikado, First Bridesmaid in Trial by Jury, Ruth in Ruddigore, and Tessa in The Gondoliers. As understudy, she also had the opportunity to play the title role in Iolanthe. She continued to perform most of these roles over the next decade.

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Percy Anderson
Percy Anderson (1851 – 30 October 1928) was an English stage designer and painter, best known for his work for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, Sir Herbert Beerbohm Tree's company at His Majesty’s Theatre and Edwardian musical comedies.
Beginning with The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), Anderson designed the costumes for all the original productions of the Savoy Operas. He continued to design costumes for D'Oyly Carte revivals in the early twentieth century, including for Trial by Jury, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, Patience, Iolanthe, Princess Ida, Ruddigore, The Yeomen of the Guard, and The Gondoliers. For Herbert Beerbohm Tree at His Majesty's Theatre, Anderson designed Twelfth Night, The Merry Wives of Windsor, Richard II, King John, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and two plays by Stephen Phillips, Herod and Ulysses.
Among Anderson's other successes were Kismet (1911) and Chu Chin Chow (1916) for Oscar Asche, Trelawny of the 'Wells' by Pinero, Véronique (1904), Merrie England (1902) and Fallen Fairies (1909) at the Savoy, and productions of musical comedies for George Edwardes. He designed the costumes for Henry James’s ill-fated theatrical effort, Guy Domville; The Times was not impressed by either the play or the costumes. He designed the costumes for the hit musical San Toy in 1899, The Duchess of Dantzic in 1903, and the hit British premiere of The Merry Widow in 1907 and for many successful musicals. The Royal Opera House also commissioned Anderson to design costumes in 1900. Anderson's designs were also used in a number of Broadway productions.

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Peter Goffin
Peter Goffin F.R.S.A. (28 February 1906 - 22 March 1974), was an English set and costume designer and stage manager, known for his work with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Goffin was born in Plymouth, England, the son of Willam Earl Goffin and Elizabeth Goffin, née Underwood. From 1922 to 1930 he worked as an interior decorator and mural painter locally. As a young man, he was taken on by the local repertory theatre in Plymouth as a designer, going on to Dartington Hall from 1931-34 where he took over responsibility for staging, costumes and lighting of the Dance-Drama Group. In 1935 and 1936 he was resident director at the Barn Theatre, Chesham Bois, Buckinghamshire.
In 1936, Goffin went to the Westminster Theatre in London, working with Harley Granville Barker and Michael MacOwan on a range of productions, from classics such as Volpone, Uncle Vanya and Troilus and Cressida, to modern works including Mourning Becomes Electra, Heartbreak House, and T. S. Eliot's The Family Reunion. In 1938 Goffin was invited by the government to supervise a course on stagecraft and to lecture on the subject.

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Peter Pratt
Peter Pratt (21 March 1923 – 11 January 1995) was an English actor and singer who is best remembered for his comic roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.
Pratt started his career in the chorus of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1945, moving up to small roles and then understudying Martyn Green, the principal comedian. From 1951 to 1959, he was the company's principal comedian, earning critical praise in the famous "patter" roles. After leaving the company, he moved on to a career in theatre, television, concert and radio, although he continued to perform the Gilbert and Sullivan roles throughout his career. One of his best-known television roles was the second Master in the BBC science fiction television series Doctor Who.
Pratt was born and grew up in Eastbourne, England, where he began to study singing as a child and was a soloist in his church choir. He was also involved in amateur theatrical societies.
Peter Pratt joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the chorus in September 1945, at the age of 22. He began to play small roles with the company in 1947, including Go-To in The Mikado. In the 1948–49 season, he became second understudy to Martyn Green and continued to play several of the smaller roles, including Bouncer in Cox and Box, Bill Bobstay in H.M.S. Pinafore and Major Murgatroyd in Patience. He got his big break when he was called upon to play Robin Oakapple in Ruddigore on short notice in May 1949 (and several of the other "patter" roles that summer), when both Green and the principal understudy fell ill. He was soon given the primary understudy responsibilities, filling in for most of the comic "patter" roles, as well as playing several of the other smaller roles from time to time.

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Richard Mansfield
Richard Mansfield (24 May 1857 - 30 August 1907) was an English actor-manager best known for his performances in Shakespeare plays, Gilbert and Sullivan operas and for his portrayal of the dual title roles in Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde.
Mansfield was born in Berlin and spent his early childhood on Heligoland, Germany, an island in the North Sea, then under British rule. His mother was Madame Erminia Rudersdorff (1822–1882), the operatic soprano, and his father, Maurice Mansfield (died 1861), a British London-based wine merchant. His grandfather was the violinist Joseph Rudersdorff. Mansfield was educated at Derby School, in Derby, England, where he studied painting in London. His mother took him to America, but he returned to England at age 20. Finding that he could not make a living as a painter, he gained some success as a drawing-room entertainer, eventually moving into acting.
He first appeared on the stage at St. George's Hall, London, in the German Reed Entertainments and then turned to light opera, joining Richard D'Oyly Carte's Comedy Opera Company in 1879 to appear as Sir Joseph Porter in H.M.S. Pinafore on tour. He continued to play the Gilbert and Sullivan comic "patter" roles on tour in Britain until 1881. Mansfield created the role of Major General Stanley in the single copyright performance of The Pirates of Penzance in Paignton, England, in 1879. In addition to Sir Joseph and the Major General, he also played John Wellington Wells in The Sorcerer beginning in 1880.

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Robert Evett
Robert Evett (16 October 1874 – 15 January 1949) was an English singer, actor, theatre manager and producer.
Robert Evett was born in Warwickshire, England.
In 1892 Evett joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company on tour in The Vicar of Bray, playing the Reverend Henry Sandford, the tenor lead. In 1893, Evett added the role of Oswald in Haddon Hall. In 1894, the company toured with Gilbert and Sullivan's Utopia Limited, with Evett playing the role of Lord Dramaleigh. In 1895, Evett added the roles of Bertuccio in Mirette, Count Vazquez (and sometimes Pedro Gomez) in The Chieftain, Mr. Box in Cox and Box, and Prince Hilarion in Princess Ida. He also moved up to the tenor lead, Captain Fitzbattleaxe in Utopia.
In 1896, D'Oyly Carte touring companies played The Grand Duke with Evett as Ernest Dummkopf, Utopia, with Evett as Captain Fitzbattleaxe, and other Gilbert and Sullivan operas in repertory. In 1897 and 1898, Evett toured with D'Oyly Carte in the principal tenor roles of Alexis in The Sorcerer, Ralph Rackstraw in H.M.S. Pinafore, Frederic in The Pirates of Penzance, the Duke of Dunstable in Patience, Earl Tolloller in Iolanthe, Cyril in Princess Ida, Nanki-Poo in The Mikado, Colonel Fairfax in The Yeomen of the Guard, and Marco in The Gondoliers, as well as (briefly) Prince Max in His Majesty.

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Robert Planquette
Jean Robert Planquette (31 July 1848 – 28 January 1903) was a French composer of songs and operettas.
Several of Planquette's operettas were extraordinarily successful in Britain, including Les cloches de Corneville (1878), the length of whose initial London run broke all records for any piece of musical theatre up to that time, and Rip Van Winkle (1882), which earned international fame.
The son of a singer, Planquette was born in Paris and educated at the Paris Conservatoire. He did not finish his studies, lacking the funds to do so, and worked as a café pianist and composer and singing (he was a tenor). A few romances that he composed brought less fame than did his song, "Sambre et Meuse", first sung in 1867 by Lucien Fugère, who went on to be one of the foremost French opera singers of his day.
In 1876, the director of the Théâtre des Folies-Dramatiques gave Planquette a commission to compose his first operetta, Les cloches de Corneville. It opened in Paris in 1877, running for an extremely successful 480 performances, and then enjoyed an astonishing London run, beginning in 1878, of a record-breaking 708 performances. Planquette's music has been praised for its pathos and romantic feeling. Le Chevalier Gaston was produced in 1879 with little success. In 1880 came Les Voltigeurs du 32ieme which had a long run in London in 1887 as The Old Guard, and La Cantiniére, which was translated into English as Nectarine, though never produced.

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Ronald Searle
Ronald William Fordham Searle CBE, RDI (3 March 1920 – 30 December 2011) was a British artist and satirical cartoonist. He is perhaps best remembered as the creator of St Trinian's School and for his collaboration with Geoffrey Willans on the Molesworth series.
Searle was born in Cambridge, England, where his father was a porter at Cambridge Railway Station. He started drawing at the age of five and left school at the age of 15. He trained at Cambridge College of Arts and Technology (now Anglia Ruskin University) for two years.
In April 1939, realizing that war was inevitable, he abandoned his art studies to enlist in the Royal Engineers. In January 1942, he was stationed in Singapore. After a month of fighting in Malaya, Singapore fell to the Japanese, and he was taken prisoner along with his cousin Tom Fordham Searle. He spent the rest of the war a prisoner, first in Changi Prison and then in the Kwai jungle, working on the Siam-Burma Death Railway. Searle contracted both beri-beri and malaria during his incarceration, which included numerous beatings, and his weight dropped to less than 40 kilograms. He was liberated in late 1945 with the final defeat of the Japanese.

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Rosina Brandram
Rosina Brandram (2 July 1845 – 28 February 1907) was an English opera singer and actress primarily known for creating many of the contralto roles in the Savoy operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Brandram joined the D'Oyly Carte company in 1877 as a chorister and understudy. By 1879, she was originating roles with the company, and she became its principal contralto in 1884, creating roles in seven of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan operas, as well as many other Sullivan comic operas. She was the only principal to appear in every original Sullivan production at the Savoy Theatre, and she performed with the company until 1903. After leaving D'Oyly Carte, she played only a few more roles before retiring from the stage.
Brandram was born Rosina Moult in Southwark, London. Although she was not originally intended for an operatic career, she had "a very thorough musical education in Italy and England".
She joined Richard D'Oyly Carte's Comedy Opera Company at the Opera Comique in 1877 as a chorus member and understudy to Mrs. Howard Paul in the role of Lady Sangazure in the original production of The Sorcerer, performing the role briefly in December of that year. She played Lady Sangazure on a provincial tour in 1878, and the next year deputised at the Opera Comique as Little Buttercup in H.M.S. Pinafore in August 1879.

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Royston Nash
Royston Hulbert Nash (born July 23, 1933) is an English-born conductor, best known as a music director of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Beginning as a conductor with the Royal Marines from 1957 to 1970. He then joined D'Oyly Carte, becoming Music Director from 1971 to 1979. There, he led the company during its centenary year in 1975 and issued a number of recordings, including the company's only recordings of Utopia, Limited, The Grand Duke, and The Zoo, as well as recordings of some rarely-heard Sullivan music. He then moved to the U.S., where he became musical director of the Nashua Symphony Orchestra for 21 years and the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra for 27 years. He also founded and conducted Symphony by the Sea and Boston Conservatory of Music. He still resides in the U.S.
Nash was born in Southampton and grew up in Bournemouth. At the age of sixteen, he joined the Royal Marines School of Music, remaining there for six years and receiving a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music in conducting. He then studied the trumpet under George Eskdale for a year at the Royal Academy of Music, where he as awarded the Certificate of Merit for Conducting in 1957. He also held the Bronze Medal of the Worshipful Company of Musicians. His mentors included Rudolf Kempe, Constantin Silvestri and Sir Malcolm Sargent.

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Ruth Vincent
Ruth Vincent (22 March 1877 – 4 July 1955) was an English opera singer and actress, best remembered for her performances in soprano roles of the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in the 1890s and her roles in the West End during the first decade of the 20th century, particularly her role as Sophia in Tom Jones.
Vincent joined D'Oyly Carte in 1894 in the chorus at the age of 17. She began to play small roles in 1896, taking on larger roles in Gilbert and Sullivan revivals the following year and soon creating leading roles including Iza in The Grand Duchess of Gerolstein (1897–98), Laine in The Beauty Stone (1898) and Princess Laoula in The Lucky Star (1899). She also continued to sing leading roles in Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, including Casilda in The Gondoliers and Aline in The Sorcerer in 1898 and Josephine in H.M.S. Pinafore in 1899. Unhappy to be passed over for the leading soprano role in The Rose of Persia, Vincent left the company near the end of 1899.
After this, Vincent went on to a substantial career in Edwardian musical comedies, opera and concert singing. She created leading West End roles in Véronique (1904–05), Tom Jones (1907), The Belle of Brittany (1909) and several others, and she also performed on Broadway. From 1910, she began a grand opera career at Covent Garden and Drury Lane and then toured in oratorio and concerts and also in variety shows, performing until 1930.

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Rutland Barrington
Rutland Barrington (15 January 1853 – 31 May 1922) was an English singer, actor, comedian, and Edwardian musical comedy star. Best remembered for originating the lyric baritone roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from 1877 to 1896, his performing career spanned more than four decades. He also wrote at least a dozen works for the stage.
After two years with a comic touring company, Barrington joined Richard D'Oyly Carte's opera company and, over the next two decades, created a number of memorable comic opera roles, including Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), the Sergeant of Police in The Pirates of Penzance (1880), and Pooh Bah in The Mikado (1885), among many others. Failing in an 1888 attempt to become a theatrical manager, Barrington refocused his energies on acting and occasional playwriting.
Beginning in 1896 and continuing for ten years, Barrington played in a series of very successful musical comedies under the management of George Edwardes at Daly's Theatre, specialising in comic portrayals of pompous rulers or other persons of authority. One of the most popular features of his performances was his insertion of topical songs, or verses of songs, into these musical comedies. After leaving Daly's he continued to appear in musical comedy roles and performed in music hall. He also essayed a few Shakespeare and other dramatic roles and appeared in a few silent films. His career ended in 1918, after which he suffered a stroke and lived the last few years of his life in poverty.

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Sarah Travis
Sarah Travis is a British orchestrator and musical supervisor for theatre and film. She received the Tony Award for Best Orchestrations and the Drama Desk Award for Outstanding Orchestrations for the 2005 revival of Stephen Sondheim's Sweeney Todd.
Travis attended City University and Guildhall School of Music and Drama.
She has been the musical supervisor and/or orchestrator for many musicals, both in the West End and at regional British theatres. Some of the latter include Crazy for You and Me and My Girl (Aberystwyth); Annie (Belfast Lyric); Pal Joey (York). Additionally, she has composed music for several shows, such as Dick Whittington at the Barbican Centre, and seven other pantomimes for Chipping Norton. She was the musical director and arranger for Privates on Parade at the West Yorkshire Playhouse and Birmingham Repertory Theatre Company (15 September 2008 to 11 October 2008).
She was also the music supervisor for the Agatha Christie Marple series television movie Sleeping Murder (2006).

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Selina Dolaro
Selina Dolaro (20 August 1849 - 23 January 1889) was an English singer, actress, theatre manager and writer. During a career in operetta and other forms of musical theatre, she managed several of her own opera companies and raised four children as a single mother. She is best remembered as a producer of the original production of Trial by Jury by Gilbert and Sullivan.
Dolaro was born in London. Her father was the violinist and conductor Benjamin Simmonds, and her mother was Julia (née Lewis). Dolaro received early music lessons from her father's colleagues, and she attended the Paris Conservatory as a teenager to continue her musical studies. In 1865, at the age of sixteen, she married Isaac Dolaro Belasco, an Italian Jew of Spanish descent, in Upper Kennington, England. By 1870, she had adopted Dolaro as her stage name.
Dolaro made her stage debut at the Lyceum Theatre, in the role of the Spanish princess, Galsuinda, in Hervé's operetta Chilpéric in 1870 and soon played there in Offenbach operettas. Successes at various London theatres followed: After a season at the Gaiety Theatre, London, Dolaro starred in an English-language Offenbach adaptation called Breaking the Spell, on tour with Fred Sullivan's Operetta Company in 1871. In 1872 Dolaro was a leading performer in H. B. Farnie's English-language adaptation of Offenbach's Geneviève de Brabant, in Hervé's Doctor Faust and in a burlesque of Ferdinand Hérold's Zampa ("Charmingly sung by Miss Dolaro in imitation of Mdlle Chaumont", said The Times) She also appeared in the title role of Bizet's Carmen in the first English-language production, with the Carl Rosa Opera Company, opposite Durward Lely as Don José. In 1873, Dolaro divorced her husband on the grounds of his adultery and desertion; she brought up her two sons and two daughters on her own income.

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Signor Brocolini
John Clark, better known as Signor Brocolini (September 26, 1841 – June 7, 1906), was an Irish-born American operatic singer remembered for creating the role of the Pirate King in the original New York City production of The Pirates of Penzance by Gilbert and Sullivan, in 1879-80. First a journalist, then a baseball player, Brocolini began his singing career in the 1870s and performed into the 1890s, taking his stage name from the borough of Brooklyn, New York, where he grew up, and Italianizing it.
The son of native Scots John and Lillian Clark, Brocolini was born John Clark in County Cork, Ireland. Fleeing the Great Potato Famine, the family moved to settle in Brooklyn, New York, about 1853. Young Brocolini became an avid baseball fan and player. By his teens, he was also learning the printing trade from his father.
He began his career working for newspapers, soon becoming a reporter in Brooklyn. In the spring of 1865, immediately after the American Civil War, Brocolini moved to Detroit, Michigan. He began there as a proofreader for the Detroit Advertiser and Tribune and, at the same time, played first base for the newly revived Detroit Base Ball Club. In July 1865, he married Lizzie Fox, the daughter of a blacksmith. The couple had a son, Kingsley. The Advertiser and Tribune reported closely on baseball, and Brocolini eventually began to write editorials. He also became club director of the Detroit team. Brocolini helped his team to become the dominant club in Michigan and the region.

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Simon Gallaher
Simon Gallaher (born 24 October 1958) is an Australian singer, actor, director and pianist.
He was born in Brisbane and attended Anglican Church Grammar School. During the early 1980s, Gallaher had his own television program, The Simon Gallaher Show, in which he sang and played the piano. Later, Gallaher joined the Queensland Light Opera Company.
With his own musical theatre company Essgee Entertainment, Gallaher has produced and acted in stage productions of The Pirates of Penzance, H.M.S. Pinafore, The Mikado, The Merry Widow and A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, among others.

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Stanley Sadie
Stanley Sadie CBE (30 October 1930 – 21 March 2005) was a leading British musicologist, music critic, and editor. He was editor of the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980), which was published as the first edition of the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians.
Sadie was educated at St Paul's School, London, and Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he read music under Thurston Dart (BA, MusB 1953, MA 1957, PhD 1958). His doctoral dissertation was on mid-eighteenth-century British chamber music. After Cambridge, he taught at Trinity College of Music, London (1957-1965).
Sadie then turned to music journalism, becoming music critic for The Times (1964-1981), and contributing reviews to the Financial Times after 1981, when he had to leave his position and The Times because of his commitments to the Grove and other scholarly work. He was editor of The Musical Times 1967-1987.
From 1970 Sadie was editor of what was planned to be the sixth edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (1980). Sadie oversaw major changes to the Dictionary, which grew from nine volumes to 20, and was published as the New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (New Grove), and is now referred to as the first edition under that name. He was also an important force behind the second edition of New Grove (2001), which grew further to 29 volumes. Sadie also oversaw a major expansion of the Grove franchise, editing the one-volume Grove Concise Dictionary of Music (1988), and several spinoff dictionaries, such as the New Grove Dictionary of Musical Instruments (three volumes, 1984), the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, (with H. Wiley Hitchcock, four volumes, 1986), and the New Grove Dictionary of Opera (four volumes, 1992). He also edited composer biographies based on the entries in Grove.

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Sydney Granville
Sydney Granville (1880 – 27 December 1959) was an English singer and actor, best known for his performances in the Savoy Operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
After early theatrical work in musical comedy, straight plays and grand opera, he joined the D'Oyly Carte company, at first in the chorus, then in lyric baritone roles and finally in the comic bass-baritone parts of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas. With brief breaks when he performed for other managements, Granville was with D'Oyly Carte from 1907 to 1942.
Granville was born Walter Dewhurst in Bolton, Lancashire. His early stage appearances were on tour in a musical comedy entitled Dorcas, a romantic drama, The God of War, and in grand opera with the Moody-Manners Opera Company.
Granville joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company chorus in 1907, soon understudying the role of Lord Mountararat in Iolanthe at the Savoy Theatre in London. When the season ended, he toured with the company in the chorus and played the small role of Selworthy in the curtain raiser After All!. The next season, at the Savoy, he played John Lloyd in Fenn and Faraday's A Welsh Sunset, given as a curtain raiser to H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance, and he understudied Henry Lytton in the role of Dick Deadeye in Pinafore.

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The Bohemian Girl
The Bohemian Girl is an opera composed by Michael William Balfe with a libretto by Alfred Bunn. The plot is loosely based on a Cervantes tale, La Gitanilla.
The opera was first produced in London at the Drury Lane Theatre on November 27, 1843. The production ran for more than 100 nights and enjoyed many revivals worldwide including: New York (25 November 1844), Dublin (1844), Philadelphia (1844) and Madrid (1845).
Several versions in different languages were also staged during Balfe’s life. The German version, Die Zigeunerin, premiered in Vienna in 1846, the Italian adaptation and translation, titled La zingara, was originally staged in Trieste in 1854, and finally a four-act French version, "La Bohemienne", was mounted in Rouen in 1862, conducted by composer Jules Massenet, then aged only 20, and with the celebrated mezzo-soprano Celestine Galli-Marie in the role of the Gypsy Queen. If Die Zigeunerin enjoyed fairly widespread circulation in the countries of German language or culture, La zingara was often revived also in English-speaking towns, such as London, Dublin, New York, Boston and San Francisco. The very successful 1858 run at Her Majesty's Theatre in London, for which Balfe was rewarded with an extra cheque for fifty pounds, starred Marietta Piccolomini, Marietta Alboni and Antonio Giuglini.

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Thomas Round
Thomas Round (born 18 October 1915) is a retired English opera singer and actor, best known for his performances in the tenor roles of the Savoy Operas and in grand opera.
During World War II, Round served in the RAF as a flying instructor for the United States Air Force, also singing in concerts. He sang leading tenor roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas for the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from 1946 to 1949. He next spent six years in the 1950s singing opera and operetta with Sadler's Wells Opera. From 1958 to 1964, Round again performed mostly with the D'Oyly Carte company. He co-founded a new ensemble, Gilbert and Sullivan for All, with which he toured extensively, singing and serving as one of the company's directors. He also broadcast on radio and television and is heard on many recordings.
Round was born and raised in Barrow-in-Furness (now in Cumbria but at that time part of Lancashire). On leaving school he started working as an apprentice joiner. In 1936 he joined the police force and was stationed in Lancaster. In 1938 he married Alice (d. 30 December 2010) at St Paul's Church, Barrow, and the couple had one son, Ellis.

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Todd Rundgren
Todd Harry Rundgren (born June 22, 1948) is an American multi-instrumentalist, songwriter and record producer. Hailed in the early stage of his career as a new pop-wunderkind, supported by the certified gold solo double LP Something/Anything? in 1972, Todd Rundgren's career has produced a diverse range of recordings as solo artist, and during the seventies and eighties with the band Utopia. He has also been prolific as a producer and engineer on the recorded work of other musicians.
During the 1970s and 1980s, Rundgren engineered and/or produced many notable albums for other acts, including Straight Up by Badfinger, Stage Fright by The Band, We're an American Band by Grand Funk Railroad, Bat Out of Hell by Meat Loaf, and Skylarking by XTC. In the 1980s and 1990s his interest in video and computers led to Rundgren's "Time Heals" being the eighth video played on MTV, and "Change Myself" was animated by Rundgren on commercially available Amiga Computers.
His best-known songs include "Hello It's Me" and "I Saw the Light" which have heavy rotation on classic rock radio stations, and "Bang the Drum All Day" featured in many sports arenas, commercials, and movie trailers. Although lesser known, "Couldn't I Just Tell You" has had a major influence on artists in the power pop musical genre.

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Tom Taylor
Tom Taylor (19 October 1817 – 12 July 1880) was an English dramatist, critic, biographer, public servant, and editor of Punch magazine. He wrote about 100 plays during his career, including Our American Cousin (1858), famous as the play which was being performed in the presence of American President Abraham Lincoln when he was assassinated in 1865.
Taylor was born into a wealthy family at Bishopwearmouth, present day Sunderland, in north-east England. His father owned a brewery. After attending school at the Grange in Sunderland, and studying for two sessions at the University of Glasgow, he became a student of Cambridge University's Trinity College in 1837. In 1840 he received a B.A. with honors in both classics and mathematics, and a Master's degree in 1843.
Taylor began his working life as a journalist. Soon after moving to London, he wrote for the Morning Chronicle and the Daily News. He was on the staff of Punch magazine until 1874, when he succeeded Charles William Shirley Brooks as editor. He was also was an art critic for The Times and The Graphic.

wn.com/Tom_Taylor
Tony Blair
Anthony Charles Lynton Blair (born 6 May 1953) is a British Labour Party politician who served as the Prime Minister of the United Kingdom from 2 May 1997 to 27 June 2007. He was the Member of Parliament (MP) for Sedgefield from 1983 to 2007 and Leader of the Labour Party from 1994 to 2007. He resigned from all of these positions in June 2007.
Blair was elected Leader of the Labour Party in the leadership election of July 1994, following the sudden death of his predecessor, John Smith. Under his leadership, the party used the phrases "New Labour" and "New Socialism" to define its policy, and moved away from its support of state socialism since the 1960s and created a new version of the ethical socialism that was last pursued by Clement Attlee. Critics of Blair claim that "New Labour" did not adhere to socialism as claimed, and that it effectively advocated capitalism. Blair subsequently led Labour to a landslide victory in the 1997 general election. At 43 years old, he became the youngest Prime Minister since Lord Liverpool in 1812. In the first years of the New Labour government, Blair's government implemented a number of 1997 manifesto pledges, introducing the minimum wage, Human Rights Act and Freedom of Information Act, and carrying out devolution, establishing the Scottish Parliament, the National Assembly for Wales, and the Northern Ireland Assembly.

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Tyrone Guthrie
Sir William Tyrone Guthrie (2 July 1900 – 15 May 1971) was an English theatrical director instrumental in the founding of the Stratford Festival of Canada, the Guthrie Theater in Minneapolis, Minnesota and the Tyrone Guthrie Centre, at his family's ancestral home, Annaghmakerrig, near Newbliss in County Monaghan, Ireland.
Guthrie was born in Tunbridge Wells, Kent, England, the son of Dr Thomas Guthrie (a grandson of the Scottish preacher Thomas Guthrie) and Norah Power. His mother Norah was the daughter of Sir William James Tyrone Power, Commissary-General-in-chief of the British Army from 1863 to 1869 and Martha, daughter of Dr. John Moorhead of Annaghmakerrig House and his Philadelphia-born wife, Susan (née Allibone) Humphreys. His great-grandfather was the Irish actor Tyrone Power. He was also a second cousin of the Hollywood actor Tyrone Power. His sister, Susan Margaret, married his close university friend, fellow Anglo-Irishman Hubert Butler. Butler translated the text for Guthrie's 1934 production of Anton Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, for perhaps its first English-language production.

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Virginia Bottomley
Virginia Bottomley, Baroness Bottomley of Nettlestone, PC, DL (née Virginia Hilda Brunette Maxwell Garnett, born 12 March 1948, Dunoon, Scotland) is a British Conservative Party politician. She was a Member of Parliament (MP) in the House of Commons from 1984 to 2005. She was raised to the peerage in 2005. Considered to be a "One Nation Conservative", Bottomley is a Life Member of the Tory Reform Group. Virginia is a member of the Supervisory Board of AkzoNobel NV, an NED on BUPA and a Trustee of The Economist Newspaper. As part of her pro-bono activities, Virginia is Chancellor of the University of Hull and Governor of the London School of Economics. She is a member of the UK Advisory Council of the International Chamber of Commerce. She has been Chair of the Board Practice at executive head hunting firm Odgers Berndtson since 2001.
Virginia Hilda Brunette Maxwell Garnett was born in Dunoon to W. John Garnett, former director of what was then called The Industrial Society, and Barbara Rutherford-Smith, former pupil of the School of St Helen and St Katharine, teacher and elected Conservative member of the Inner London Education Authority. Her aunt on her father's side was Labour Greater London Council Member Peggy Jay. She met Peter, now Sir Peter Bottomley her husband, when she was 12.

wn.com/Virginia_Bottomley
Walter Passmore
Walter Henry Passmore (10 May 1867 – 29 August 1946) was an English singer and actor best known as the first successor to George Grossmith in the comic baritone roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.
Passmore began performing professionally at the age of fourteen in the pantomime Cinderella. He apprenticed to a piano maker and then worked as a pianist before returning to acting, making his London debut in 1890. In 1893, Passmore joined the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, soon becoming the company's principal comedian. He created roles in the original productions of the last two Gilbert and Sullivan operas and in many other Savoy Operas. He also played the patter roles in several Gilbert and Sullivan revivals, and he also toured for the company.
In 1903, Passmore left the company and began a career in musical comedies, plays and pantomimes in London's West End and on tour that lasted for thirty years. His West End appearances included roles in such important productions as The Earl and the Girl (1903), The Talk of the Town (1905) and Madame Pompadour (1924). He often appeared on stage with his wife, Agnes Fraser.

wn.com/Walter_Passmore
Winthrop Ames
Winthrop Ames (November 25, 1870 – November 3, 1937) was an American theatre director and producer, playwright and screenwriter.
For three decades at the beginning of the 20th century, Ames was an important force on Broadway, whose repertoire included directing and producing Shakespeare and classic plays, new plays, and revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.
Ames was born in North Easton, Massachusetts to Cathrine Hobart and Oakes Angier Ames, members of a wealthy manufacturing family. Ames studied art and architecture at Harvard University. He worked in the publishing business before turning to a career in the theatre. In 1911, Ames married Lucy (Fuller) Cabot in London, and the couple had two daughters named Catherine and Joan.
In 1904, Ames toured Europe to study the management techniques of sixty opera and theatre companies. Upon his return to America, he became manager of Boston's Castle Square Theatre. In 1908, he was appointed managing director of the New Theatre in New York, at Central Park West and 62nd Street, where Lee Shubert was the business manager. The New Theatre was the largest playhouse in New York City at that time, and Ames began to produce ambitious productions, mostly of Shakespeare and other classics. In November 1908, the theatre opened with an opulent production of Antony and Cleopatra starring Julia Marlowe and E. H. Sothern. The theatre was a financial failure and closed after only two seasons.

wn.com/Winthrop_Ames

HMS PINAFORE

A concert performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's timeless classic from the BBC Proms 2005. ...

published: 07 Apr 2012

author: Basicallybenign

Gilbert & Sullivan - HMS Pinafore - John Reed - D'Oyly Carte Opera (Royston Nash)

...

published: 11 Sep 2012

author: roy13820

HMS Pinafore - We Sail the Ocean Blue

Essgee's production with Amanda Muggleton as Buttercup. Also Jon English Simon Gallaher He...

published: 14 May 2008

author: geeandess

HMS Pinafore - Never Mind the Why or Wherefore

Essgee's production with Jon English Simon Gallaher Helen Donaldson Drew Forsythe David Go...

published: 14 May 2008

author: geeandess

HMS Pinafore: When I was a lad & Ruler of the Queen's Navee

This short extract was from the The Gilbert & Sullivan Society of North Louisiana's 1999 p...

published: 27 May 2008

author: rearvumirror

I am the Captain of the Pinafore

Essgee's version of HMS Pinafore...

published: 05 Aug 2010

author: essgee007

We Sail the Oceans Blue - HMS Pinafore

The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company Performs Gilbert & Sullivan's The HMS Pinafore, or The Lass...

published: 09 Aug 2010

author: Anarchemitis

When I Was a Lad - HMS Pinafore

The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company Performs Gilbert & Sullivan's The HMS Pinafore, or The Lass...

published: 09 Aug 2010

author: Anarchemitis

For He Is An Englishman - HMS Pinafore

The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company Performs Gilbert & Sullivan's The HMS Pinafore, or The Lass...

published: 09 Aug 2010

author: Anarchemitis

HMS Pinafore

New York Gilbert & Sullivan Players production of HMS Pinafore at The Cerritos Center for ...

published: 02 Nov 2010

author: nygasp13

20 - Things are seldom what they seem

From the Welsh National Opera's recording...

published: 26 Oct 2010

author: LadyThetis

HMS Pinafore - For he is an Englishman

HMS Pinafore - Gilbert & Sullivan's opera....

published: 24 Apr 2008

author: ScenePoa

HMS Pinafore - Little Buttercup

Essgee's NZ production with Rima Te Wiata as Buttercup. Also Jon English Simon Gallaher He...

published: 14 May 2008

author: geeandess

Star Trek - HMS Pinafore

[HMS Pinafore] by Gilbert and Sullivan British Tar A British tar is a soaring soul As free...

published: 03 Nov 2010

author: MrHawelka

HMS Pinafore Act II

Preliminary run of HMS Pinafore (Arts Theatre 2010)...

published: 14 Jan 2010

author: William Wadsworth

HMS PINAFORE TRACK ONE

published: 30 Aug 2012

author: Saint Matthew's School Band

H.M.S. Pinafore - Sir Joseph's Song

Sir Joseph's song from the Gilbert & Sullivan's opera H.M.S. Pinafore. Recorded during the...

published: 14 Sep 2008

author: Munduate

HMS Pinafore Rehearsal - First Half

published: 15 Jan 2010

author: Stuart Moore

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photo: US Navy / HMC Josh Ives

U.S. Army Spc. Jacob Bobbe, security force team member for Provincial Reconstruction Team (PRT) Farah, maintains security on the street during a key leader engagement in the Lash-e Juwayn district of Farah province, Afghanistan, Dec. 11 2012.

Imperial Lockstep

CounterPunch

27 Dec 2012

Imperial adventures are nothing new in the Middle East. Neither is their glorification, as Peter O’Toole’s pained Lawrence of Arabia eternally reminds us. But for a decade or so now, things have been heating up, as if to coincide with climate change and fears of declining petroleum reserves ... The Belly for Belligerence? ... The question loomed over beltway intelligentsia like an ephemeral Gordian knot ... We’re All Hawks Now ... While George W ... ....(size: 9.3Kb)

photo: WN / Janice Sabnal

Six dead as winter snowstorms pound US

Zeenews

27 Dec 2012

Washington. Six people, including two young children, were left dead in weather-related accidents, as winter snowstorms complicated travel for many Americans in the Midwest and Northeast on Wednesday. Snow totals in parts of Indiana ranged from 6 to 12 inches, CNN reported. About 350 snowploughs were clearing roads throughout the city. New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo told residents they should avoid nonessential travel ... IANS ... ....(size: 2.2Kb)

photo: AP / Ben Curtis

In this Sunday, April 29, 2012 file photo, troops from the Central African Republic stand guard at a building used for joint meetings between them and U.S. Army special forces, in Obo, Central African Republic, where U.S. special forces have paired up with local troops and Ugandan soldiers to seek out Joseph Kony's Lord's Resistance Army (LRA).

CAR seeks foreign help against rebels

Al Jazeera

28 Dec 2012

The president of Central African Republic (CAR) has urgently called on France and other foreign powers to help his government fend off rebels who are quickly seizing territory and approaching the capital. Speaking to crowds in Bangui, a city of some 600,000, Francois Bozize on Thursday pleaded with foreign powers to do what they could. He pointed in particular to France, Central African Republic's former colonial ruler ... 516 Share ... News ... ....(size: 19.5Kb)

photo: AP / K.M.Chaudary

Supporters of Pakistan's slain leader Benazir Bhutto, stand beside her portrait after lighting earth lamps at a ceremony to mark the second anniversary of her death

Pakistan marks fifth anniversary of Benazir Bhutto murder

BBC News

27 Dec 2012

Large crowds of Pakistan People's Party (PPP) supporters are gathering to mark the fifth anniversary of the murder of ex-Prime Minister Benazir Bhutto. Ms Bhutto died in a gun and bomb attack during her 2007 election campaign. Hundreds of thousands of people have set up camp near the Bhutto family's ancestral home in Sindh province ... He cannot contest an election until his 25th birthday. Show of strength ... ....(size: 2.4Kb)

photo: AP

Free Syrian Army soldiers stand guard at a checkpoint in the northern town of Ariha, on the outskirts of Idlib, Syria, Sunday, June 10, 2012.

Syria military police chief defects to rebels

The Guardian

26 Dec 2012

News of defection comes as activists say 20 people, including eight children, have been killed by shelling in north of country. Assad’s forces are hitting back at a string of rebel advances across the country. Photograph. Abdalghne Karoof/REUTERS. The head of Syria's military police has defected from the army and declared allegiance to the uprising against the president, Bashar al-Assad, according to a video and a Syrian security source....(size: 3.4Kb)

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New Year; Sailing to New Horizons

The Examiner

29 Dec 2012

Tweet. 0 Email. Report. Photo 1 of 14. HMS Bounty Credit. Gerald J. Furnkranz. HMS BountySailing on a diamond sea!Getting underway!Ships passing!HMS Bounty in her glory!Catting!Frigate HMS Rose!At anchor in the sun!Schooner in Baltimore!Schooner Malibar on Seneca Lake!New Malibar on Seneca Lake!Schooner and Baltimore Bridge!Sailing and Liberty!Sun, sailing and Seneca!More >You might also like. Sailing Home ... Recommended ... ....(size: 3.8Kb)

Today in History - Wire Today in History - The Sacramento Bee --> 0 comments ...

Sacramento Bee

29 Dec 2012

Today is Saturday, Dec. 29, the 364th day of 2012. There are two days left in the year. Today's Highlight in History .. On Dec. 29, 1972, Eastern Air Lines Flight 401, a Lockheed L-1011 Tristar, crashed into the Florida Everglades near Miami International Airport, killing 101 of the 176 people aboard ... In 1812, during the War of 1812, the American frigate USS Constitution engaged and severely damaged the British frigate HMS Java off Brazil....(size: 4.7Kb)

Thatcher urged to steal French-made Exocet missiles during Falklands war

The Guardian

28 Dec 2012

National Archives papers outline plan of attorney general to hijack missiles being transported through South America. HMS Sheffield was hit by an Exocet missile fired by the Argentinian air force on 4 May 1982 and sank while being towed to safe water. Photograph. Pa/PA Archive/Press Association Ima ... HMS Sheffield and the SS Atlantic Conveyor were among those sunk ... He explained ... She added ... This is the last thing that either of us would wish....(size: 8.1Kb)

Major rift in relations after British sank 'Belgrano'

Irish Times

28 Dec 2012

It is possible matters would never have come to a head if Thatcher and her “war cabinet” had not ordered the sinking of the Argentine cruiser, General Belgrano, by the nuclear submarine, HMS Conqueror, on May 2nd, 48km outside the 320km Falklands exclusion zone, with a death-toll of 368, mostly sailors in their teens....(size: 6.8Kb)

UK government considered World Cup boycott during Falklands War

Goal

28 Dec 2012

Newly-released documents from the time urge "no sporting contact with Argentina" and indicate international players felt "revulsion" at the thought of facing the country. By John Stammers. More On . England, N. Ireland, Scotland, Wales. Comments ... Don't Miss ... It read ... "However, the loss of British life on HMS Sheffield and Sea Harriers has had a marked effect on some international footballers and some administrators ... ....(size: 2.8Kb)

' Margaret Thatcher blasted Ronald Reagan over Falklands plea'

Zeenews

28 Dec 2012

London. Former British prime minister Margaret Thatcher’s frantic efforts to win the Falkland Island war have been revealed in extraordinary details, as official files on the crisis have been made public after 30 years ... Nearly 20 crew members were killed when HMS Sheffield was crippled by one of the missiles ... He added that as the UK now had the upper hand militarily “it should strike a deal now” ... ANI ... First Published ... ....(size: 2.4Kb)

Margaret Thatcher warned François Mitterrand off selling Exocets to Argentina

The Independent

28 Dec 2012

Even in the opinion of its author it was a scheme that owed more to James Bond than the reality of the Falklands War ... The British were haunted by concerns that Argentina would be able to replenish its stocks of the French-built Exocet which was used with such devastating effect against the British naval task force, destroying HMS Sheffield and the Atlantic Conveyor ... “All of this will be totally independent of any UK connection.”....(size: 2.3Kb)

World Cup withdrawal considered amid Falklands War

BBC News

28 Dec 2012

The government considered pulling the home nations out of the football World Cup in 1982 during the Falklands War with Argentina, official papers show ... But Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher was warned withdrawal would be a propaganda "opportunity" for Argentina ... "However, the loss of British life on HMS Sheffield and Sea Harriers has had a marked effect on some international footballers and some administrators ... ....(size: 2.6Kb)

Secret files reveal Margaret Thatcher blasted Ronald Reagan over Falklands peace plea

Newstrack India

28 Dec 2012

Tweet. London, Dec. 28 (ANI). Former British Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher's frantic efforts to win the Falkland Island war have been revealed in extraordinary details, as official files on the crisis have been made public after 30 years ... Nearly 20 crew members were killed when HMS Sheffield was crippled by one of the missiles ... He added that as the UK now had the upper hand militarily "it should strike a deal now" ... (ANI). Read More ... ) . ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)

1982 World Cup pull-out considered

Belfast Telegraph

28 Dec 2012

The British government considered pulling out of the 1982 World Cup as war broke out with Argentina over the Falkland Islands, newly released documents reveal ... In April 1982 Mr Macfarlane wrote to the Sports Council, saying ... On May 11 Mr Macfarlane wrote to Margaret Thatcher, saying ... However, the loss of British life on HMS Sheffield and Sea Harriers has had a marked effect on some international footballers and some administrators ... ....(size: 3.3Kb)

Falklands a ridiculous war, said Haughey

Irish Times

28 Dec 2012

123. Protesters burn a British flag. photograph. ap; gettyBritish soldiers advancing during the Falklands War. photograph ... photograph. ap; getty ... He was speaking on June 11th, 1982, more than a month after Britain’s war cabinet ordered the sinking of the Argentine cruiser General Belgrano by nuclear submarine HMS Conqueror, 48km outside the 320km Falklands exclusion zone, with a death toll of 368, mostly sailors in their teens ... ....(size: 3.6Kb)

Thatcher ‘warned France to cut off Exocets in Falklands war’

Khaleej Times

28 Dec 2012

Britain’s relationship with France was strained at the height of the Falklands War over fears the French could allow Argentina to acquire Exocet missiles, previously secret files showed on Friday ... One Exocet hit the Type-42 destroyer, HMS Sheffield, crippling the ship — which eventually sank six days later — and killing 20 crew ... The following day she fired off a blistering telegram ... ....(size: 3.3Kb)

Falklands invasion 'surprised' Thatcher

BBC News

28 Dec 2012

The 1982 invasion of the Falkland Islands by Argentina caught Margaret Thatcher by surprise, newly released government papers have shown. The then-prime minister only saw it was likely after getting "raw intelligence" two days before the Argentines landed ... The transcript of that dramatic testimony has now been published for the first time ... Argentine cruiser General Belgrano sunk by HMS Conqueror, killing more than 320 21 May ... ....(size: 5.6Kb)

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Theatre poster, 1879

H.M.S. Pinafore; or, The Lass That Loved a Sailor is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and a libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It opened at the Opera Comique in London, England, on 25 May 1878 and ran for 571 performances, which was the second-longest run of any musical theatre piece up to that time. H.M.S. Pinafore was Gilbert and Sullivan's fourth operatic collaboration and their first international sensation.

The story takes place aboard the British ship H.M.S. Pinafore. The captain's daughter, Josephine, is in love with a lower-class sailor, Ralph Rackstraw, although her father intends her to marry Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty. She abides by her father's wishes at first, but Sir Joseph's advocacy of the equality of humankind encourages Ralph and Josephine to overturn conventional social order. They declare their love for each other and eventually plan to elope. The captain discovers this plan, but, as in many of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, a surprise disclosure changes things dramatically near the end of the story.

Drawing on several of his earlier "Bab Ballad" poems, Gilbert imbued this plot with mirth and silliness. The opera's humour focuses on love between members of different social classes and lampoons the British class system in general. Pinafore also pokes good-natured fun at patriotism, party politics, the Royal Navy, and the rise of unqualified people to positions of authority. The title of the piece comically applies the name of a garment for girls and women, a pinafore, to the fearsome symbol of a naval warship.

Pinafore's extraordinary popularity in Britain, America and elsewhere was followed by the similar success of a series of Gilbert and Sullivan works, including The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado. Their works, later known as the Savoy operas, dominated the musical stage on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a decade and continue to be performed today. The structure and style of these operas, particularly Pinafore, were much copied and contributed significantly to the development of modern musical theatre.

Background [link]

In 1875, Richard D'Oyly Carte, who was then managing the Royalty Theatre for Selina Dolaro, brought Gilbert and Sullivan together to write their second show, a one-act opera entitled Trial by Jury.^[1] This proved a success, and in 1876 D'Oyly Carte assembled a group of financial backers to establish the Comedy Opera Company, which was devoted to the production and promotion of family-friendly English comic opera.^[2] With this theatre company, Carte finally had the financial resources, after many failed attempts, to produce a new full-length Gilbert and Sullivan opera.^[3] This next opera was The Sorcerer, which opened in November 1877. It too was successful, running for 178 performances.^[4] Sheet music from the show sold well, and street musicians played the melodies.^[5]

Instead of writing a piece for production by a theatre proprietor, as was usual in Victorian theatres, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte produced the show with their own financial support. They were therefore able to choose their own cast of performers, rather than being obliged to use the actors already engaged at the theatre. They chose talented actors, most of whom were not well-known stars and did not command high fees, and to whom they could teach a more naturalistic style of performance than was commonly used at the time. They then tailored their work to the particular abilities of these performers.^[6] The skill with which Gilbert and Sullivan used their performers had an effect on the audience; as critic Herman Klein wrote: "we secretly marvelled at the naturalness and ease with which [the Gilbertian quips and absurdities] were said and done. For until then no living soul had seen upon the stage such weird, eccentric, yet intensely human beings .... [They] conjured into existence a hitherto unknown comic world of sheer delight."^[7]

Punch cartoon, 1877, portraying First Lord of the Admiralty W. H. Smith as a land-lubber, saying: "I think I'll now go below." In Pinafore, Sir Joseph similarly sings: "When the breezes blow / I generally go below".

The success of The Sorcerer paved the way for another collaboration by Gilbert and Sullivan. Carte agreed on terms for a new opera with the Comedy Opera Company, and Gilbert began work on H.M.S. Pinafore before the end of 1877.^[8] Gilbert's father had been a naval surgeon, and the nautical theme of the opera appealed to him.^[9] He drew on several of his earlier "Bab Ballad" poems (many of which also have nautical themes), including "Captain Reece" (1868) and "General John" (1867).^[10] Some of the characters also have prototypes in the ballads: Dick Deadeye is based on a character in "Woman's Gratitude" (1869); an early version of Ralph Rackstraw can be seen in "Joe Go-Lightly" (1867), with its sailor madly in love with the daughter of someone who far outranks him; and Little Buttercup is taken almost wholesale from "The Bumboat Woman's Story" (1870).^[11]^[12] On 27 December 1877, while Sullivan was on holiday on the French Riviera, Gilbert sent him a plot sketch accompanied by the following note:^[13]

I have very little doubt whatever but that you will be pleased with it. ... there is a good deal of fun in it which I haven't set down on paper. Among other things a song (a kind of 'Judge's Song') for the First Lord – tracing his career as office-boy ... clerk, traveller, junior partner and First Lord of Britain's Navy .... Of course there will be no personality in this – the fact that the First Lord in the Opera is a Radical of the most pronounced type will do away with any suspicion that W. H. Smith is intended.^[13]^[14]

Despite Gilbert's disclaimer, audiences, critics and even the Prime Minister identified Sir Joseph Porter with W. H. Smith (a politician who had recently been appointed First Lord of the Admiralty despite having neither military nor nautical experience).^[15] Sullivan was delighted with the sketch, and Gilbert read a first draft of the plot to Carte in mid-January.^[16]

Following the example of his mentor, T. W. Robertson, Gilbert strove to ensure that the costumes and sets were as realistic as possible.^[17] When preparing the sets for H.M.S. Pinafore, Gilbert and Sullivan visited Portsmouth in April 1878 to inspect ships. Gilbert made sketches of H.M.S. Victory and H.M.S. St Vincent and created a model set for the carpenters to work from.^[18] This was far from standard procedure in Victorian drama, in which naturalism was still a relatively new concept, and in which most authors had very little influence on how their plays and libretti were staged.^[19] This attention to detail was typical of Gilbert's stage management and would be repeated in all of his Savoy Operas.^[20] Gilbert's focus on visual accuracy provided a "right-side-up for topsy-turvydom", that is, a realistic point of reference that serves to heighten the whimsicality and absurdity of the situations.^[21] Sullivan was "in the full swing" of work on the piece by the middle of April 1878.^[22] The bright and cheerful music of Pinafore was composed during a time when Sullivan suffered from excruciating pain from a kidney stone.^[23]^[24] The cast began music rehearsals on 24 April, and at the beginning of May 1878, the two collaborators worked closely together at Sullivan's flat to finalise the piece.^[25]^[26]

In Pinafore, Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte used several of the principal cast members that they had assembled for The Sorcerer. As Gilbert had suggested to Sullivan in December 1877, "Mrs. Cripps [Little Buttercup] will be a capital part for Everard .... Barrington will be a capital captain, and Grossmith a first-rate First Lord."^[13] However, Mrs. Howard Paul,^[27] who had played Lady Sangazure in The Sorcerer, was declining vocally. She was under contract to play the role of Cousin Hebe in Pinafore. Gilbert made an effort to write an amusing part for her despite Sullivan's reluctance to use her, but by mid-May 1878, both Gilbert and Sullivan wanted her out of the cast; unhappy with the role, she left. With only a week to go before opening night, Carte hired concert singer Jessie Bond to play Cousin Hebe.^[28]^[29] Since Bond had little experience as an actress, Gilbert and Sullivan cut the dialogue out of the role, except for a few lines in the last scene, which they turned into recitative.^[30] Other new cast members were Emma Howson and George Power in the romantic roles, who were improvements on the romantic soprano and tenor in The Sorcerer.^[12]

Gilbert acted as stage director for his own plays and operas. He sought realism in acting, just as he strove for realistic visual elements. He deprecated self-conscious interaction with the audience and insisted on a style of portrayal in which the characters were never aware of their own absurdity but were coherent internal wholes.^[31] Sullivan conducted the music rehearsals. As was to be his usual practice in his later operas, Sullivan left the overture for the last moment, sketching it out and entrusting it to the company's music director, in this case Alfred Cellier, to complete.^[4] Pinafore opened on 25 May 1878 at the Opera Comique.

Roles [link]

The Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, KCB, First Lord of the Admiralty (comic baritone)
Captain Corcoran, Commander of H.M.S. Pinafore (lyric baritone)
Ralph^[32] Rackstraw, Able Seaman (tenor)
Dick Deadeye, Able Seaman (bass-baritone)
Bill Bobstay, Boatswain's Mate (baritone)
Bob Becket, Carpenter's Mate (bass)
Josephine, The Captain's Daughter (soprano)
Cousin Hebe, Sir Joseph's First Cousin (mezzo-soprano)
Mrs. Cripps (Little Buttercup), A Portsmouth Bumboat Woman (contralto)
Chorus of First Lord's Sisters, His Cousins, His Aunts, Sailors, Marines, etc.

Synopsis [link]

Act I [link]

The British warship H.M.S. Pinafore is at anchor off Portsmouth. The sailors are on the quarterdeck, proudly "cleaning brasswork, splicing rope, etc."

Little Buttercup, a Portsmouth "bumboat woman" (dockside vendor) – who is the "rosiest, roundest, and reddest beauty in all Spithead" – comes on board to sell her wares to the crew. She hints that she may be hiding a dark secret under her "gay and frivolous exterior". Ralph Rackstraw,^[32] "the smartest lad in all the fleet", enters, declaring his love for the Captain's daughter, Josephine. His fellow sailors (excepting Dick Deadeye, the grim and ugly realist of the crew) offer their sympathies, but they can give Ralph little hope that his love will ever be returned.

Scene from 1886 Savoy Theatre souvenir programme

The gentlemanly and popular Captain greets his "gallant crew" and compliments them on their politeness, saying that he returns the favour by never ("well, hardly ever") using bad language, such as "a big, big D".^[33] After the sailors leave, the Captain confesses to Little Buttercup that Josephine is reluctant to consider a marriage proposal from Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty. Buttercup says that she knows how it feels to love in vain. As she leaves, the Captain remarks that she is "a plump and pleasing person". Josephine enters and reveals to her father that she loves a humble sailor in his crew, but she assures him that she is a dutiful daughter and will never reveal her love to this sailor.

Sir Joseph comes on board, accompanied by his "admiring crowd of sisters, cousins and aunts". He recounts how he rose from humble beginnings to be "ruler of the Queen's Navee" through persistence, although he has no naval qualifications. He then delivers a humiliating lesson in etiquette, telling the Captain that he must always say "if you please" after giving an order; for "A British sailor is any man's equal" – excepting Sir Joseph's. Sir Joseph has composed a song to illustrate that point, and he gives a copy of it to Ralph. Shortly afterwards, elated by Sir Joseph's views on equality, Ralph decides that he will declare his love to Josephine. This delights his shipmates, except Dick Deadeye, who contends that "when people have to obey other people's orders, equality's out of the question". Shocked by his words, the other sailors force Dick to listen to Sir Joseph's song before they exit, leaving Ralph alone on deck. Josephine now enters, and Ralph confesses his love in terms surprisingly eloquent for a "common sailor". Josephine is touched, but although she has found Sir Joseph's attentions nauseating, she knows that it is her duty to marry Sir Joseph instead of Ralph. Disguising her true feelings, she "haughtily rejects" Ralph's "proffered love".

Ralph summons his shipmates (Sir Joseph's female relatives also arrive) and tells them that he is bent on suicide. The crew expresses sympathy, except for Dick, who provides a stark counterpoint of dissent. Ralph puts a pistol to his head, but as he is about to pull the trigger, Josephine enters, admitting that she loves him after all. Ralph and Josephine plan to sneak ashore to elope that night. Dick Deadeye warns them to "forbear, nor carry out the scheme", but the joyous ship's company ignores him.

Act II [link]

Later that night, under a full moon, Captain Corcoran reviews his concerns: his "kindly crew rebels", his "daughter to a tar is partial", his friends seem to desert him, and Sir Joseph has threatened a court-martial. Little Buttercup offers sympathy. He tells her that, if it were not for the difference in their social standing, he would have returned her affection. She prophesies that things are not all as they seem and that "a change" is in store for him, but he does not understand her cryptic warning.

Illustration of the characters in Act II by D. H. Friston, 1878

Sir Joseph enters and complains that Josephine has not yet agreed to marry him. The Captain speculates that she is probably dazzled by his "exalted rank" and that if Sir Joseph can persuade her that "love levels all ranks", she will accept his proposal. They withdraw, and Josephine enters, still feeling guilty about her planned elopement with Ralph and fearful of giving up a life of luxury. When Sir Joseph makes the argument that "love levels all ranks", a delighted Josephine says that she "will hesitate no longer". The Captain and Sir Joseph rejoice, but Josephine is now more determined than ever to marry Ralph.

Dick Deadeye intercepts the Captain and tells him of the lovers' plans to elope. The Captain confronts Ralph and Josephine as they try to leave the ship. The pair declare their love, justifying their actions because "He is an Englishman!" The furious Captain is unmoved and blurts out, "Why, damme, it's too bad!" Sir Joseph and his relatives, who have overheard this oath, are shocked to hear swearing on board a ship, and Sir Joseph orders the Captain confined to his cabin.

When Sir Joseph asks what had provoked the usually polite officer's outburst, Ralph replies that it was his declaration of love for Josephine. Furious in his turn at this revelation, and ignoring Josephine's plea to spare Ralph, Sir Joseph has the sailor "loaded with chains" and taken to the ship's dungeon. Little Buttercup now comes forward to reveal her long-held secret. Many years ago, when she "practised baby-farming", she had cared for two babies, one "of low condition", the other "a regular patrician". She confesses that she "mixed those children up .... The wellborn babe was Ralph; your Captain was the other."

Sir Joseph now realises that Ralph should have been the Captain, and the Captain should have been Ralph. He summons both, and they emerge wearing one another's uniforms: Ralph as Captain, in command of the Pinafore, and Corcoran as a common sailor. Sir Joseph's marriage with Josephine is now "out of the question" in his eyes: "love levels all ranks ... to a considerable extent, but it does not level them as much as that." He hands her to Captain Rackstraw. The former Captain's now-humble social rank leaves him free to marry Buttercup. Sir Joseph settles for his cousin Hebe, and all ends in general rejoicing.

Musical numbers [link]

Overture

Act I

1. "We sail the ocean blue" (Sailors)
2. "Hail! men-o'-war's men" ... "I'm called Little Buttercup" (Buttercup)
2a. "But tell me who's the youth" (Buttercup and Boatswain)
3. "The nightingale" (Ralph and Chorus of Sailors)
3a. "A maiden fair to see" (Ralph and Chorus of Sailors)
4. "My gallant crew, good morning" (Captain and Chorus of Sailors)
4a. "Sir, you are sad" (Buttercup and Captain)
5. "Sorry her lot who loves too well" (Josephine)
5a. Cut song: "Reflect, my child" (Captain and Josephine)
6. "Over the bright blue sea" (Chorus of Female Relatives)
7. "Sir Joseph's barge is seen" (Chorus of Sailors and Female Relatives)

Rutland Barrington as A.B.S. Corcoran at the end of Pinafore

8. "Now give three cheers" (Captain, Sir Joseph, Cousin Hebe and Chorus)
9. "When I was a lad" (Sir Joseph and Chorus)
9a. "For I hold that on the sea" (Sir Joseph, Cousin Hebe and Chorus)
10. "A British tar" (Ralph, Boatswain, Carpenter's Mate and Chorus of Sailors)
11. "Refrain, audacious tar" (Josephine and Ralph)
12. Finale, Act I: "Can I survive this overbearing?"

Act II

(Entr'acte)

13. "Fair moon, to thee I sing" (Captain)
14. "Things are seldom what they seem" (Buttercup and Captain)
15. "The hours creep on apace" (Josephine)
16. "Never mind the why and wherefore" (Josephine, Captain and Sir Joseph)
17. "Kind Captain, I've important information" (Captain and Dick Deadeye)
18. "Carefully on tiptoe stealing" (Soli and Chorus)
18a. "Pretty daughter of mine" (Captain and Ensemble) and "He is an Englishman" (Boatswain and Ensemble)
19. "Farewell, my own" (Ralph, Josephine, Sir Joseph, Buttercup and Chorus)
20. "A many years ago" (Buttercup and Chorus)
20a. "Here, take her, sir" (Sir Joseph, Josephine, Ralph, Cousin Hebe and Chorus)¹
21. Finale: "Oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen" (Ensemble) ²

¹See discussion of versions, below.

²Includes reprises of several songs, concluding with "For he is an Englishman".

Productions [link]

Poster illustration from original 1878 production

Pinafore opened on 25 May 1878 at the Opera Comique, before an enthusiastic audience, with Sullivan conducting.^[34]^[35] Soon, however, the piece suffered from weak ticket sales, generally ascribed to a heat wave that made the Opera Comique particularly uncomfortable.^[36]^[37] Historian Michael Ainger questions this explanation, at least in part, stating that the heat waves in the summer of 1878 were short and transient.^[38] In any case, by mid-August, Sullivan wrote to his mother that cooler weather had arrived, which was good for the show.^[39] In the meantime, the four partners of the Comedy Opera Company lost confidence in the opera's viability and posted closing notices.^[39]^[40] Carte publicised the piece by presenting a matinee concert performance on 6 July 1878 at the enormous Crystal Palace.^[41]

In late August 1878, Sullivan used some of the Pinafore music, arranged by his assistant Hamilton Clarke, during several successful promenade concerts at Covent Garden that generated interest and stimulated ticket sales.^[42] By September, Pinafore was playing to full houses at the Opera Comique. The piano score sold 10,000 copies,^[43] and Carte soon sent two additional companies out to tour in the provinces.^[44]

Carte, Gilbert and Sullivan now had the financial resources to produce shows themselves, without outside backers. Carte persuaded the author and composer that a business partnership among the three would be to their advantage, and they hatched a plan to separate themselves from the directors of the Comedy Opera Company. The contract between Gilbert and Sullivan and the Comedy Opera Company gave the latter the right to present Pinafore for the duration of the initial run. The Opera Comique was obliged to close for drain and sewer repairs, and was renovated and redecorated by E. W. Bradwell, from Christmas 1878 to the end of January 1879.^[45] Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte believed that this break ended the initial run, and, therefore, ended the company's rights. Carte put the matter beyond doubt by taking a six-month personal lease of the theatre beginning on 1 February 1879, the date of its re-opening, when Pinafore resumed. At the end of the six months, Carte planned to give notice to the Comedy Opera Company that its rights in the show and the theatre had ended.^[46]^[47]

Meanwhile, numerous pirated versions of Pinafore began playing in America with great success, beginning with a production in Boston that opened on 25 November 1878.^[37] Pinafore became a source of popular quotations on both sides of the Atlantic, such as the exchange:

"What, never?"

"No, never!"

"What, never?"

"Well, hardly ever!"^[48]^[49]

Opening night programme cover

In February 1879, Pinafore resumed operations at the Opera Comique.^[50] The opera also resumed touring in April, with two companies crisscrossing the British provinces by June, one starring Richard Mansfield as Sir Joseph, the other W. S. Penley in the role. Hoping to join in on the profits to be made in America from Pinafore, Carte left in June for New York to make arrangements for an "authentic" production there to be rehearsed personally by the author and composer. He arranged to rent a theatre and auditioned chorus members for the American production of Pinafore and a new Gilbert and Sullivan opera to be premiered in New York, and for tours.^[51]

Sullivan, as had been arranged with Carte and Gilbert, gave notice to the partners of the Comedy Opera Company in early July 1879 that he, Gilbert and Carte would not be renewing the contract to produce Pinafore with them and that he would be withdrawing his music from the Comedy Opera Company on 31 July.^[51]^[52]^[53] In return, the Comedy Opera Company gave notice that they intended to play Pinafore at another theatre and brought a legal action against Carte and company. They offered the London and touring casts of Pinafore more money to play in their production, and although some choristers accepted their offer, only one principal player, Mr Dymott, accepted.^[54] They engaged the Imperial Theatre but had no scenery. On 31 July, they sent a group of thugs to seize the scenery and props during Act II of the evening performance at the Opera Comique.^[55] Gilbert was away, and Sullivan was recovering from an operation for kidney stones.^[56] Stagehands and cast members managed to ward off their backstage attackers and protect the scenery, although the stage manager, Richard Barker, and others, were injured. The cast went on with the show until someone shouted "Fire!" George Grossmith, playing Sir Joseph, went before the curtain to calm the panicked audience. The police arrived to restore order, and the show continued.^[57]^[58]^[59] Gilbert sued to stop the Comedy Opera Company from staging their rival production of H.M.S. Pinafore.^[60] The court permitted the production to go on at the Imperial, beginning on 1 August 1879, and it transferred to the Olympic Theatre in September. Pauline Rita was one of a series of Josephines.^[61] The production received good notices and initially sold well but was withdrawn in October after 91 performances.^[54] The matter was eventually settled in court, where a judge ruled in Carte's favour about two years later.^[62]

After his return to London, Carte formed a new partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan to divide profits equally after the expenses of each of their shows.^[63] Meanwhile, Pinafore continued to play strongly. On 20 February 1880, Pinafore completed its initial run of 571 performances.^[64] Only one other work of musical theatre in the world had ever run longer, Robert Planquette's operetta Les cloches de Corneville.^[65]^[66]

[edit] Taking Pinafore to the United States

Approximately 150 unauthorised productions of Pinafore sprang up in the United States in 1878 and 1879, and none of these paid royalties to the authors.^[67]^[68]^[69] The first of these, opening at the Boston Museum on 25 November 1878, made such a splash that the piece was quickly produced in major cities and on tour by dozens of companies throughout the country. Boston alone saw at least a dozen productions, including a juvenile version described by Louisa May Alcott in her 1879 story, "Jimmy's Cruise in the Pinafore".^[70] In New York, the piece played simultaneously in eight theatres within five blocks of each other.

Advertisement for a (probably unlicensed) American production of H.M.S. Pinafore

These pirated performances took many forms, including burlesques, productions with men playing women's roles and vice-versa, spoofs, variety acts, Minstrel show versions,^[70] all-black and Catholic productions, German, Yiddish and other foreign-language versions,^[68] performances on boats or by church choirs,^[71] and productions starring casts of children.^[37]^[70] Sheet music arrangements were popular, there were Pinafore-themed dolls and household items, and references to the opera were common in advertising, news and other media.^[68] Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte brought lawsuits in the U.S. and tried for many years to control the American performance copyrights over their operas, or at least to claim some royalties, without success. They made a special effort to claim American rights for their next work after Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance, by giving the official premiere in New York.^[72]

Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte met by 24 April 1879 to make plans for a production of Pinafore in America.^[73] Carte travelled to New York in the summer of 1879 and made arrangements with theatre manager John T. Ford^[74] to present, at the Fifth Avenue Theatre, the first authorised American production of Pinafore.^[51] In November, he returned to America with Gilbert, Sullivan and a company of strong singers, including J. H. Ryley as Sir Joseph, Blanche Roosevelt as Josephine, Alice Barnett as Little Buttercup, Furneaux Cook as Dick Deadeye, Hugh Talbot as Ralph Rackstraw and Jessie Bond as Cousin Hebe.^[75] To these, he added some American singers, including Signor Brocolini as Captain Corcoran.^[76] Alfred Cellier came to assist Sullivan, while his brother François remained in London to conduct Pinafore there.^[77]

Pinafore opened in New York on 1 December 1879 (with Gilbert onstage in the chorus) and ran for the rest of December. After a reasonably strong first week, audiences quickly fell off, since most New Yorkers had already seen local productions of Pinafore.^[78] This was unexpected and forced Gilbert and Sullivan to race to complete and rehearse their new opera, The Pirates of Penzance, which premièred with much success on 31 December.^[75] Shortly thereafter, Carte sent three touring companies around the United States East Coast and Midwest, playing Pinafore alongside Pirates.^[76]^[79]

Children's production [link]

File:Grattanpin.jpg

1880 programme for Carte's Children's Pinafore

The unauthorised juvenile productions of Pinafore were so popular that Carte mounted his own children's version, played at matinees at the Opera Comique beginning on 16 December 1879.^[80] François Cellier, who had taken over from his brother as Carte's music director in London, adapted the score for children's voices.^[59] Between its two Christmas seasons in London, the children's production went on a provincial tour from 2 August 1880 to 11 December 1880.^[81]

Carte's children's production earned enthusiastic reviews from critic Clement Scott^[82] and the other London critics, as well as the audiences, including children.^[79]^[83] However, Captain Corcoran's curse "Damme!" was uncensored, shocking such prominent audience members as Lewis Carroll, who later wrote: "a bevy of sweet innocent-looking girls sing, with bright and happy looks, the chorus 'He said, Damn me! He said, Damn me!' I cannot find words to convey to the reader the pain I felt in seeing those dear children taught to utter such words to amuse ears grown callous to their ghastly meaning .... How Mr. Gilbert could have stooped to write, or Sir Arthur Sullivan could have prostituted his noble art to set to music, such vile trash, it passes my skill to understand".^[84]^[85]

Subsequent productions [link]

After the opera became successful in London, Richard D'Oyly Carte quickly sent touring companies into the British provinces. At least one D'Oyly Carte company, and sometimes as many as three, played Pinafore under Carte's aegis every year between 1878 and 1888, including its first London revival in 1887. The opera was then given a rest, returning to the touring repertory between 1894 and 1900 and again for most of the time between 1903 and 1940.^[86] Gilbert directed all the revivals during his lifetime, and after his death, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company had exclusive performing rights to the Savoy operas until 1962. It continued to hew closely to Gilbert's directions throughout that period, as recorded in Gilbert's prompt books, and it also required its licensees to follow them closely.^[87]

Ruth Vincent as Josephine in 1899

Until 1908, revivals of the opera were given in contemporary dress.^[88] After that, designers such as Percy Anderson, George Sheringham and Peter Goffin created Victorian costume designs.^[88]^[89] In the winter of 1940–41, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's scenery and costumes for Pinafore and three other operas were destroyed by German bombs during World War II.^[90] The opera was revived in London in the summer of 1947.^[91] It was then included in the D'Oyly Carte repertory in every season from then on, until the company's closure in 1982.^[92] The D'Oyly Carte company performed Pinafore before Queen Elizabeth II and the royal family at Windsor Castle on 16 June 1977, during the queen's Silver Jubilee year, the first royal command performance of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera since 1891.^[37]

The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company did not allow any other professional company to present the Savoy operas in Britain until the copyrights expired at the end of 1961, although it licensed many amateur and school societies to do so, beginning in the 19th century.^[93] After 1961, other professional companies mounted productions of the opera in Britain. These have included Tyrone Guthrie's 1960 production from Stratford, Ontario, seen on Broadway in 1960 and in London in 1962^[94] and a New Sadler's Wells Opera Company production first seen on 4 June 1984 at Sadler's Wells Theatre,^[95] which was seen also in New York.^[96] Scottish Opera, Welsh National Opera and many of the other British opera companies have mounted productions, as did the reconstituted D'Oyly Carte Opera Company between 1990 and its closure in 2003.^[97] In recent years, the Carl Rosa Opera Company has produced Pinafore several times, including in 2009,^[98] and Opera della Luna and other British companies continue to mount the piece.^[97]^[99]

The extraordinary initial success of Pinafore in America was seen first-hand by J. C. Williamson.^[70] He soon made arrangements with D'Oyly Carte to present the opera's first authorised production in Australia, opening on 15 November 1879 at the Theatre Royal, Sydney. Thereafter, his opera company played frequent seasons of the work (and the subsequent Savoy operas) until at least 1963.^[100]^[101] In the U.S., the piece never lost popularity.^[70]^[102] The Internet Broadway Database links to forty productions on Broadway alone.^[103] Among the professional repertory companies continuing to present Pinafore regularly in the U.S. are Opera a la Carte, based in California, Ohio Light Opera and the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, which tours the opera annually and often includes it in its New York seasons.^[104] Pinafore is still performed around the world by opera companies such as the Royal Theatre, Copenhagen; Australian Opera (and Essgee Entertainment and others in Australia); in Kassel, Germany; and even Samarkand, Uzbekistan.^[105]

The following table shows the history of the D'Oyly Carte productions (excluding tours) in Gilbert's lifetime:

Theatre	Opening Date	Closing Date	Perfs.	Details
Opera Comique	25 May 1878	24 December 1878	571	Original run in London. (The theatre was closed between 25 December 1878 and 31 January 1879.)^[54]
Opera Comique	31 January 1879	20 February 1880	571
Fifth Avenue Theatre, New York	1 December 1879	27 December 1879	28	Official American premiere in New York, prior to the opening of The Pirates of Penzance.^[76]
Opera Comique	16 December 1879	20 March 1880	78	Company of juvenile performers, matinees only. (This company went on a provincial tour from 2 August to 11 December 1880.)^[81]
Opera Comique	22 December 1880	28 January 1881	28
Savoy Theatre	12 November 1887	10 March 1888	120	First London revival.^[106]
Savoy Theatre	6 June 1899	25 November 1899	174	Second London revival. Played with Trial by Jury as a forepiece.^[107]
Savoy Theatre	14 July 1908	27 March 1909	61	Second Savoy repertory season; played with five other operas. (Closing date shown is of the entire season.)^[108]

Reception [link]

Initial critical reception [link]

The early reviews were mostly favourable.^[11]^[12] The Era wrote:

Seldom indeed have we been in the company of a more joyous audience .... [Gilbert and Sullivan] have on previous occasions been productive of such legitimate amusement, such novel forms of drollery, such original wit, and unexpected whimsicality, that nothing was more natural than for the audience to anticipate an evening of thorough enjoyment. The expectation was fulfilled completely. Those who believed in the power of Mr Gilbert to tickle the fancy with quaint suggestions and unexpected forms of humour were more than satisfied, and those who appreciate Mr Arthur Sullivan's inexhaustible gift of melody were equally gratified; while that large class of playgoers who are pleased with brilliant dresses and charming stage effects declared themselves delighted. The result, therefore, was "a hit, a palpable hit" ... there were some slight drawbacks [such] as the severe cold that affected Mr. Rutland Barrington [the captain], and almost prevented his singing.

The Era also lavishly praised Emma Howson as Josephine.^[109] The Entr'acte and Limelight commented that the opera was reminiscent of Trial by Jury and Sorcerer but found it diverting and called the music "very charming. To hear so-called grand opera imitated through the medium of the most trifling lyrics, is funny".^[110]^[111] The paper praised Grossmith as Sir Joseph, noting with amusement that he was made up to look like portraits of Horatio Nelson, "and his good introductory song seems levelled at" W. H. Smith. It opined, further, that "He Is an Englishman" is "an excellent satire on the proposition that a man must necessarily be virtuous to be English". It found the piece, as a whole, well presented and predicted that it would have a long run.^[110]

Punch cartoon mocking Sullivan for his focus on comic opera

Similarly, The Illustrated London News concluded that the production was a success and that the plot, though slight, served as a good vehicle for Gilbert's "caustic humour and quaint satire". It found that there was "much to call forth hearty laughter in the occasional satirical hits .... Dr. Sullivan's music is as lively as the text to which it is set, with here and there a touch of sentimental expression .... The piece is well performed throughout."^[112] The Daily News, The Globe, The Times (which particularly praised Grossmith, Barrington and Everard) and The Standard concurred, the last commenting favourably on the chorus acting, which, it said, "adds to the reality of the illusion".^[11] The Times also noted that the piece was an early attempt at the establishment of a "national musical stage" with a libretto free from risqué French "improprieties" and without the "aid" of Italian and German musical models.^[113]

The Daily Telegraph and the Athenaeum, however, greeted the opera with only mixed praise.^[12]^[114] The Musical Times complained that the ongoing collaboration between Gilbert and Sullivan was "detrimental to the art-progress of either" because, although it was popular with audiences, "something higher is demanded for what is understood as 'comic opera'". The paper commented that Sullivan was gifted with "the true elements of an artist, which would be successfully developed were a carefully framed libretto presented to him for composition". It concluded, however, by saying how much it enjoyed the opera: "Having thus conscientiously discharged our duties as art-critics, let us at once proceed to say that H.M.S. Pinafore is an amusing piece of extravagance, and that the music floats it on merrily to the end".^[115] The Times and several of the other papers agreed that, while the piece was entertaining, Sullivan was capable of higher art. Only The Figaro was actively hostile to the new piece.^[11] Upon the publication of the vocal score, a review by The Academy joined the chorus of regret that Sullivan had sunk so low as to compose music for Pinafore and hoped that he would turn to projects "more worthy of his great ability".^[116] This criticism would follow Sullivan throughout his career.^[117]

The many unauthorised American productions of 1878–79 were of widely varying quality, and many of them were adaptations of the opera. One of the more "authentic" ones was the production by the Boston Ideal Opera Company, which was first formed to produce Pinafore. It engaged well-regarded concert singers and opened on 14 April 1879 at the 3,000-seat Boston Theatre. The critics agreed that the company fulfilled its goals of presenting an "ideal" production. The Boston Journal reported that the audience was "wrought up by the entertainment to a point of absolute approval". The paper observed that it is a mistake to consider Pinafore a burlesque, "for while irresistibly comical it is not bouffe and requires to be handled with great care lest its delicate proportions be marred and its subtle quality of humor be lost".^[70] The Journal described the opera as "classical" in method and wrote that its "most exquisite satire" lay in its "imitation of the absurdities" of grand opera. The company went on to become one of the most successful touring companies in America.^[70] The first children's version in Boston became a sensation with both children and adult audiences, extending its run through the summer of 1879. The Boston Herald wrote that "the large audience of children and their elders went fairly wild with delight ... shrieks of laughter were repeatedly heard".^[70]

Subsequent reception [link]

When Pinafore was first revived in London in 1887, it was already treated as a classic. The Illustrated London News observed that the opera had not been updated with new dialogue, jokes and songs, but concluded that this was for the best, as the public would have missed the "time-honoured jokes, such as 'Hardly Ever.' The Savoy has once more got a brilliant success."^[118] The Theatre concurred, stating that since the opera "has been heard in almost every part of this habitable globe and been enjoyed everywhere, there is not much occasion to descant". It called the revival a "most brilliant" success and predicted another long run.^[119]

Rutland Barrington as Captain Corcoran in the first London revival, 1887

Reviewing the 1899 revival, The Athenaeum managed to praise the piece while joining in the musical establishment's critique of Sullivan. On the one hand, "The Pinafore ... sounds fresher than ever. The musical world has become serious – very serious – and it is indeed refreshing to hear a merry, humorous piece, and music, unassuming in character … it is delicately scored, and in many ways displays ability of a high order". On the other hand, it wrote that if Sullivan had pursued the path of composing more serious music, like his symphony, "he would have produced still higher results; in like manner Pinafore set us wondering what the composer would have accomplished with a libretto of somewhat similar kind, but one giving him larger scope for the exercise of his gifts".^[120]

In 1911, H. L. Mencken wrote: "No other comic opera ever written – no other stage play, indeed, of any sort – was ever so popular .... Pinafore … has been given, and with great success, wherever there are theaters – from Moscow to Buenos Aires, from Cape Town to Shanghai; in Madrid, Ottawa and Melbourne; even in Paris, Rome, Vienna and Berlin."^[121] After the deaths of Gilbert and Sullivan, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company retained exclusive rights to perform their operas in Great Britain until 1962, touring throughout Britain for most of the year and, beginning in 1919, often performing in London for a season of about four months. The Times gave the company's 1920 London production an enthusiastic review, saying that the audience was "enraptured", and regretting that Pinafore would be played for only two weeks. It praised the cast, singling out Leo Sheffield as the Captain, Henry Lytton as Sir Joseph, Elsie Griffin as Josephine, James Hay as Ralph, Bertha Lewis as Little Buttercup and the "splendid" choral tone. It concluded that the opera made a "rollicking climax to the season".^[122] Two years later, it gave an even more glowing report of that season's performances, calling Derek Oldham an "ideal hero" as Ralph, noting that Sydney Granville "fairly brought down the house" with his song, that Darrell Fancourt's Deadeye was "an admirably sustained piece of caricature" and that it was a "great pleasure" to hear the returning principals.^[123] A 1961 review of the company's Pinafore is much the same.^[124]

In 1879, J. C. Williamson acquired the exclusive performing rights to Pinafore in Australia and New Zealand. His first production earned public and critical acclaim. Williamson played Sir Joseph, and his wife, Maggie Moore played Josephine. Praising the production and all the performers, the Sydney Morning Herald noted that the production though "abounding in fun" was dignified and precise, that many numbers were encored and that laughter and applause from the "immense audience ... was liberally bestowed".^[125] Williamson's company continued to produce Pinafore in Australia, New Zealand and on tour into the 1960s with much success. As Williamson said, "If you need money, then put on G&S".^[126] Meanwhile, Pinafore continued to garner praise outside of Britain. The 1950s Danish version in Copenhagen, for example, was revived repeatedly, playing for well over 100 performances to "packed houses".^[127] Translations into German, Yiddish and many other languages, and professional productions in places as remote as Samarkand in Uzbekistan have been successful.^[128]

In the U.S., where Gilbert and Sullivan's performance copyright was never in force,^[129] Pinafore continued to be produced continuously by both professional and amateur companies. The New York Times, in a 1914 review, called a large-scale production at the 6,000-seat New York Hippodrome a "royal entertainment" that "comes up smiling". The opera had been turned into a "mammoth spectacle" at with a chorus of hundreds and the famous Hippodrome tank providing a realistic harbour. Buttercup made her entrance to the three-masted Pinafore rowing into sight, and Dick Deadeye was later thrown overboard with a real splash. The Times praised the hearty singing but noted that some subtlety is lost when the dialogue needs "fairly to be shouted". The production took some liberties, including interpolating music from other Sullivan works. The paper concluded, "the mild satire of Pinafore is entertaining because it is universal".^[130] The same paper deemed Winthrop Ames' popular Broadway productions of Pinafore in the 1920s and 1930s "spectacular".^[131] Modern productions in America continue to be generally well received. The New York Times review of The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players' 2008 season at New York City Center commented, "Gilbert's themes of class inequality, overbearing nationalism and incompetent authorities remain relevant, however absurdly treated. But the lasting appeal of Pinafore and its ilk is more a matter of his unmatched linguistic genius and Sullivan’s generous supply of addictive melodies.^[132]

With the expiry of the copyrights, companies around the world have been free to produce Gilbert and Sullivan works and to adapt them as they please for almost 50 years. Productions of Pinafore, both amateur and professional, range from the traditional, in the D'Oyly Carte vein, to the broadly adapted, such as that of the very successful Essgee Entertainment (formed by Simon Gallaher) in Australia and Opera della Luna in Britain.^[128] Since its original production, H.M.S. Pinafore has remained one of Gilbert and Sullivan's most popular comic operas.^[102]^[133] Productions continue in large numbers around the world.^[99]^[128] In 2003 alone, The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company rented 224 sets of orchestra parts, mostly for productions of Pinafore, Pirates and Mikado. This does not take into account other rental companies and the theatre companies that borrow scores or have their own, or that use only one or two pianos instead of an orchestra. It is certainly true that hundreds of productions of Pinafore are presented every year worldwide.^[128]

Analysis [link]

Theatre historian John Bush Jones wrote that Pinafore has "everything a musical theatregoer could ask for. An engaging and even relatively suspenseful story is populated with varied and well-drawn characters who speak and sing witty, literate, and often outrageously funny dialogue and lyrics [and] has a score that ... has plenty of tunes for the audience to go away humming".^[134] Sir George Power, the tenor who created the role of Ralph Rackstraw, opined in later life that the secret of the success of the Savoy operas is the way in which "Sullivan entered into the spirit of Gilbert's topsy-turvy humour, and was pompous when Gilbert was sprightly, or, when Gilbert's satire was keenest and most acid, consciously wallowed in sentiment."^[135] Another commentator has suggested that the opera's enduring success lies in its focus on "mirth and silliness".^[136] Even the title of the piece is silly, applying the name of a little girl's garment, a pinafore, to the fearsome symbol of a naval warship, which usually bore names like Victory, Goliath, Audacious and Minotaur.^[137]

Satiric and comic themes [link]

Biographer Jane Stedman wrote that Pinafore is "satirically far more complex" than The Sorcerer. She commented that Gilbert uses several ideas and themes from his Bab Ballads, including the idea of gentlemanly behaviour of a captain towards his crew from "Captain Reece" (1868) and the exchange of ranks due to exchange at birth from "General John" (1867). Dick Deadeye, based on a character in "Woman's Gratitude" (1869), represents another of Gilbert's favorite (and semi-autobiographical) satiric themes: the misshapen misanthrope whose forbidding "face and form" makes him unpopular although he represents the voice of reason and common sense.^[12]^[138] Gilbert also borrows from his 1870 opera, The Gentleman in Black which includes the device of baby-switching.^[139]

File:PinaforeCups1.jpg

Souvenir programme cover from 1878 during the run of the original production

Historian H. M. Walbrook wrote in 1921 that Pinafore "satirizes the type of nautical drama of which Douglas Jerrold's Black-Eyed Susan is a typical instance, and the 'God's Englishman' sort of patriotism which consists in shouting a platitude, striking an attitude, and doing little or nothing to help one's country".^[114] In 2005, Australian opera director Stuart Maunder noted the juxtaposition of satire and nationalism in the opera, saying, "they all sing 'He is an Englishman', and you know damn well they're sending it up, but the music is so military ... that you can't help but be swept up in that whole jingoism that is the British Empire."^[140] In addition, he argued that the song ties this theme into the main satire of class distinctions in the opera: "H.M.S. Pinafore is basically a satire on ... the British love of the class system .... [A]t this moment, all of the men on board say, 'But of course [Ralph] can marry [the Captain's] daughter, because he's British, and therefore he's great'".^[140]^[141]^[142]

One of Gilbert's favourite comic themes is the elevation of an unqualified person to a position of high responsibility. In The Happy Land (1873), for example, Gilbert describes a world in which government offices are awarded to the person who has the least qualification to hold each position. In particular, the one who has never heard of a ship is appointed to the cabinet post of First Lord of the Admiralty.^[143]^[144] In Pinafore, Gilbert revisits this theme in the character of Sir Joseph, who rises to the same position by "never go[ing] to sea".^[114]^[145] In the later Gilbert and Sullivan operas, the characters Major-General Stanley, in Pirates, and Ko-Ko in The Mikado are similarly appointed to high office though lacking the necessary qualifications. Gilbert also pokes fun at party politics, implying that when Sir Joseph "always voted at [his] party's call", he sacrificed his personal integrity.^[146] The "commercial middle class" (which was Gilbert's main audience) is treated as satirically as are social climbers and the great unwashed.^[147] In addition, the apparent age difference between Ralph and the Captain, even though they were babies nursed together, satirises the variable age of Thaddeus in The Bohemian Girl.^[29] The Times wrote, in reviewing the 1929 production, that Pinafore was quintessentially Gilbertian in that the absurdities of a "paternal" Captain and the "ethics ... of all romanticism" are accepted "unflinchingly" and taken to their logical conclusion: "It is the reference to actuality that is essential; without it, the absurdity will not stand starkly out".^[147]

Theatre poster for an American production, c. 1879

A theme that pervades the opera is the treatment of love across different social ranks. In the previous Gilbert and Sullivan opera, The Sorcerer, a love potion causes trouble by inducing the villagers and wedding guests to fall in love with people of different social classes.^[148] In Pinafore, the captain's daughter, Josephine, loves and is loved by a common sailor, but she dutifully tells him, "your proffered love I haughtily reject". He expresses his devotion to her in a poetic and moving speech that ends with "I am a British sailor, and I love you". It finally turns out that he is of a higher rank than she. This is a parody of the Victorian "equality" drama, such as Lord Lytton's The Lady of Lyons (1838), where the heroine rejects a virtuous peasant who makes a similarly moving speech, ending with "I am a peasant!"^[149] It then turns out that he has become her social superior. Furthermore, in Pinafore, Sir Joseph assures Josephine that "love levels all ranks". In Tom Taylor's The Serf, the heroine again loves a worthy peasant who turns out to be of high rank, and she declares happily at the end that "love levels all".^[149] In a satire of the libertarian traditions of nautical melodrama, Sir Joseph tells the crew of the Pinafore that they are "any man's equal" (excepting his), and he writes a song for them that glorifies the British sailor. Conversely, he brings the proud captain down a notch by making him "dance a hornpipe on the cabin table".^[149] Jones notes that the union between Ralph and Josephine "becomes acceptable only through the absurd second-act revelation of Buttercup's inadvertent switching of the infants" and concludes that Gilbert is a "conservative satirist [who] ultimately advocated preserving the status quo ... [and] set out to show [that] love definitely does not level all ranks".^[134]

There is a divide among Gilbert and Sullivan scholars as to whether Gilbert is, as Jones argues, a supporter of the status quo whose focus is merely to entertain or, on the other hand, predominantly to satirise and protest "against the follies of his age".^[150] Gilbert scholar Andrew Crowther posits that this disagreement arises from Gilbert's "techniques of inversion – with irony and topsyturvydom", which lead to "the surface meaning of his writings" being "the opposite of their underlying meaning". Crowther argues that Gilbert desires to "celebrate" society's norms while, at the same time, satirising these conventions. In Pinafore, which established many patterns for the later Savoy operas, Gilbert found a way to express his own conflict that "also had tremendous appeal to the general public".^[150] He creates "a highly intelligent parody of nautical melodrama ... [though] controlled by the conventions it mocks".^[150] While nautical melodrama exalts the common sailor, in Pinafore Gilbert makes the proponent of equality, Sir Joseph, a pompous and misguided member of the ruling class who, hypocritically, cannot apply the idea of equality to himself.^[151] The hero, Ralph, is convinced of his equality by Sir Joseph's foolish pronouncements and declares his love for his Captain's daughter, throwing over the accepted "fabric of social order". At this point, Crowther suggests, the logic of Gilbert's satiric argument should result in Ralph's arrest. But to satisfy convention, Gilbert creates an obvious absurdity: the captain and Ralph were switched as babies. By an "accident of birth", Ralph is suddenly an appropriate husband for Josephine, and both the social order and the desire for a romantic happy ending are satisfied at once.^[152] Crowther concludes, "We have an opera which uses all the conventions of melodrama and ridicules them; but in the end it is difficult to see which has won out, the conventions or the ridicule." Thus, Pinafore found broadbased success by appealing to the intellectual theatregoer seeking satire, the middle-class theatre-goer looking for a comfortable confirmation of the "existing social order" and the working-class audience who saw a satisfying melodramatic victory for the common man.^[150]

Songs and musical analysis [link]

According to musicologist Arthur Jacobs, Gilbert's plot "admirably sparked off Sullivan's genius".^[153] Sullivan embraces the nautical setting; in "We Sail the Ocean Blue", for example, he "presents his twist on a traditional sea shanty".^[154] In the Captain's opening song, "I am the Captain of the Pinafore", he admits that his gentlemanliness "never ... well, hardly ever" gives way to swearing at his men, and although he has experience at sea, he "hardly ever" suffers from seasickness.^[154] Sullivan "unerringly found the right musical setting for the key phrase 'What never?' ... cunningly sharpened ... through the chromatic touch on the bassoon."^[155] Audrey Williamson argued that the music of Pinafore is quintessentially English and free of European influences throughout most of the score, from the "glee" for Ralph, the Boatswain and the Carpenter, to "For He Is an Englishman".^[156]

Gilbert's Illustration of "A British tar" (1906)

The best-known songs from the opera^[157]^[158] include "I'm called Little Buttercup", a waltz tune introducing the character, which Sullivan repeats in the entr'acte and in the Act II finale to imprint the melody on the mind of the audience;^[159] and "A British tar" (a glee for three men describing the ideal sailor), composed by Sir Joseph "to encourage independent thought and action in the lower branches of the service, and to teach the principle that a British sailor is any man's equal, excepting mine".^[153] Sullivan's voicing advances the satiric lyric, which mocks the "equality" plays while underlining the hypocrisy of Sir Joseph.^[150] Another popular number is Sir Joseph's song "When I was a Lad", recounting the meteoric rise of his career, which bears similarities to that of W. H. Smith, the civilian news entrepreneur who had risen to the position of First Lord of the Admiralty in 1877.^[114]

In Pinafore, Sullivan exploits minor keys for comic effect, for instance in "Kind Captain, I've important information".^[160] Further, he achieves a musical surprise when he uses the subdominant minor in "Sorry her lot".^[161] Biographer Gervase Hughes was impressed with the introduction to the opening chorus which includes "a rousing nautical tune ... in a key of no nonsense, C major ... a modulation to the mediant minor, where to our surprise a plaintive oboe gives us the first verse of "Sorry her lot" in 2/4 [time]. After this closes on the local dominant B major the violins (still in 2/4) introduce us to Little Buttercup ... meeting her under these conditions one would hardly expect her to blossom out later as a queen of the waltz." He continues, "the bassoon and basses ... assert vigorously who is the Captain of the Pinafore ... in the improbable key of A flat minor .... Buttercup makes a last despairing attempt to make herself heard in D flat minor, but the others have never known that such an outlandish key existed. So in a flash they all go back to C major on a good old 6/4".^[162]

According to Jacobs, "Ralph, Captain Corcoran, Sir Joseph and Josephine all live in their interactive music (particularly 'Never mind the why and wherefore'), and almost as much musical resource is lavished on two characters parodied from opera or melodrama, Little Buttercup with 'gypsy blood in her veins' and the heavy-treading Dick Deadeye."^[163] Jacobs also opined that the leading tone that begins "Never mind the why and wherefore" "serves to emphasize the phrase like a Johann Strauss-ian grace-note".^[153] Sullivan scholar David Russell Hulme noted Sullivan's parody of operatic styles, "particularly the Handelian recitatives and the elopement scene (evocative of so many nocturnal operatic conspiracies), but best of all is the travesty of the patriotic tune in 'For he is an Englishman!'"^[164] Buttercup's Act II song, in which she reveals the dark secret of the baby-switching is preceded by a quote from Franz Schubert's "The Erl-King" and also parodies the opera Il Trovatore.^[111] Jacobs notes that Sullivan also adds his own humorous touches to the music by setting commonplace expressions in "Donizettian recitative". But on the serious side, he enhances the moments of true emotional climax, as in Josephine's Act II aria, and added musical interest to concerted numbers by "subtly shifting the rhythms and bar groupings."^[155]

Revisions and cut material [link]

Ballad for Captain Corcoran, "Reflect, my child"[link]

During rehearsals for the original production, Gilbert added a ballad for Captain Corcoran in which he urged his daughter to forget the common sailor with whom she is in love, because "at every step, he would commit solecisms that society would never pardon." The ballad was meant to be sung between No. 5 and No. 6 of the current score, but it was cut before opening night. The words survive in the libretto that was deposited with the Lord Chamberlain for licensing. Before 1999, all that was known to survive of Sullivan's setting was a copy of the leader violin part.^[165]

In April 1999, Sullivan scholars Bruce I. Miller and Helga J. Perry announced that they had discovered a nearly complete orchestration – lacking only the second violin part – in a private collection of early band parts. These materials, with a conjectural reconstruction of the partially lost vocal lines and second violin part, were later published and professionally recorded.^[165]^[166] This piece has now been performed a number of times by amateur and professional companies, although it has not become a standard addition to the traditional scores or recordings.^[167]

File:Jessiehebe.jpg

Bond as Hebe with Grossmith as Sir Joseph, 1887 revival

Dialogue for Cousin Hebe [link]

In the licensing copy of the libretto, Sir Joseph's cousin Hebe had lines of dialogue in several scenes in Act II. In the scene that follows No. 14 ("Things are seldom what they seem"), she accompanied Sir Joseph onstage and echoed the First Lord's dissatisfaction with Josephine. After several interruptions, Sir Joseph urged her to be quiet, eliciting the response "Crushed again!" Gilbert would later re-use this passage for Lady Jane in Patience. Hebe was also assigned several lines of dialogue after No. 18 ("Carefully on tiptoe stealing") and again after No. 19 ("Farewell, my own").^[168]^[169]

Late in rehearsals for the original production, Jessie Bond assumed the role of Hebe, replacing Mrs. Howard Paul. Bond, who at this point in her career was known primarily as a concert singer and had little experience as an actress, did not feel capable of performing dialogue, and these passages were revised to cut Hebe's dialogue. Hebe's dialogue is occasionally restored in modern performances, particularly her lines in the scene following No. 14.^[170]

Recitative preceding the Act II finale [link]

The dialogue preceding the Act II finale, starting with "Here, take her sir, and mind you treat her kindly", was originally recitative. The music for this passage was printed in the first edition of the vocal score as No. 20a. Shortly after opening night, the recitative was dropped, and the lines thereafter were performed as spoken dialogue. In modern productions, the recitative is occasionally restored in place of the dialogue.^[167]^[169]

Recordings [link]

There have been numerous recordings of Pinafore since 1907.^[171]^[172] Ian Bradley counted seventeen recordings of the opera available on CD in 2005.^[173]

	"Pinafore airs", pt. 1 Part 1 of a 4-part recording of H.M.S. Pinafore created by Edison Records in 1911. Includes "We sail the ocean blue" "Hail, men-o'-war's men", "I'm called Little Buttercup" and "A maiden fair to see"
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

	"Pinafore airs", pt. 2 Part 2 of the 4-part recording. Includes "My gallant crew, good morning", "I am the Captain of the Pinafore", "Sorry her lot" (second verse, beginning "Sad is the hour"), "Over the bright blue sea" and "I am the monarch of the sea"
Problems listening to this file? See media help.

The 1930 recording is notable for preserving the performances of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company stars of the era. The 1960 D'Oyly Carte recording, which contains all the dialogue, has been repeatedly praised by reviewers.^[174] The 1994 Mackerras recording, featuring grand opera singers in the principal roles, is musically well-regarded.^[171]^[175] The 2000 D'Oyly Carte recording also contains complete dialogue and the first recording of the "lost" ballad for Captain Corcoran, "Reflect, my child", as a bonus track.^[176] A 1957 Danish-language recording of the opera is one of the few foreign-language professional recordings of Gilbert and Sullivan.^[177]

In 1939, Pinafore was chosen by NBC as one of the earliest operas ever broadcast on American television, but no recording appears to have been saved.^[178] The 1973 D'Oyly Carte video recording, directed by Michael Heyland, demonstrates the company's staging of the period, but some reviewers find it dull.^[171] It is, however, one of only three video or film recordings of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.^[179] The 1982 video of Pinafore is considered one of the worst of the Brent Walker Productions series of Gilbert and Sullivan television productions.^[180]^[181] The International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival offers various video recordings of the opera, including its 2003 professional G&S Opera Company Pinafore video.^[182]

Selected recordings

1922 D'Oyly Carte – Conductors: Harry Norris and George W. Byng^[183]
1930 D'Oyly Carte – London Symphony Orchestra; Conductor: Malcolm Sargent^[184]
1949 D'Oyly Carte – Conductor: Isidore Godfrey^[185]
1958 Sargent/Glyndebourne – Pro Arte Orchestra, Glyndebourne Festival Chorus; Conductor: Sir Malcolm Sargent^[186]
1960 D'Oyly Carte (with dialogue) – New Symphony Orchestra of London; Conductor: Isidore Godfrey^[174]^[187]
1972 G&S for All – G&S Festival Chorus & Orchestra; Conductor: Peter Murray^[188]
1973 D'Oyly Carte (video) – Conductor: Royston Nash^[179]
1981 Stratford Festival (video) – Conductor: Berthold Carrière; Director: Leon Major^[189]
1987 New Sadler's Wells Opera – Conductor: Simon Phipps^[190]
1994 Mackerras/Telarc – Orchestra and Chorus of the Welsh National Opera; Conductor: Sir Charles Mackerras^[191]
1997 Essgee Entertainment (video; adapted) – Conductor: Kevin Hocking^[192]
2000 D'Oyly Carte (with dialogue) – Conductor: John Owen Edwards^[176]

Adaptations [link]

File:PinaforePictureBook.png

The Pinafore Picture Book, 1908

H.M.S. Pinafore has been adapted many times. W. S. Gilbert wrote a 1909 children's book called The Pinafore Picture Book, illustrated by Alice Woodward, which retells the story of Pinafore, in some cases giving considerable backstory that is not found in the libretto.^[193]^[194] Many other children's books have since been written retelling the story of Pinafore or adapting characters or events from Pinafore.^[195]

Many musical theatre adaptations have been produced since the original opera. Notable examples include a 1945 Broadway musical adapted by George S. Kaufman, called Hollywood Pinafore, using Sullivan's music.^[196] This was revived several times, including in London in 1998.^[197] Another 1945 Broadway musical adaptation, Memphis Bound!, was written by Don Walker and starred Bill Robinson and an all-black cast.^[198] In 1940, the American Negro Light Opera Association produced the first of several productions set in the Caribbean Sea, Tropical Pinafore.^[197] An early Yiddish adaptation of Pinafore, called Der Shirtz (Yiddish for "apron") was written by Miriam Walowit in 1952 for a Brooklyn, New York Hadassah group, and they recorded 12 of the songs.^[199] In the 1970s, Al Grand was inspired by this recording and urged the Gilbert and Sullivan Long Island Light Opera Company to perform these songs. He later translated the missing songs and dialogue, with Bob Tartell, and the show has been toured widely under the name Der Yiddisher Pinafore. The group have continued to produce this adaptation for over two decades, in which "He is an Englishman" becomes "Er Iz a Guter Yid" ("He is a good Jew").^[200]^[201]

Essgee Entertainment produced an adapted version of Pinafore in 1997 in Australia and New Zealand^[202] that has been much revived.^[203] Another musical adaptation is Pinafore! (A Saucy, Sexy, Ship-Shape New Musical), adapted by Mark Savage. It was first performed at the Celebration Theater in Los Angeles, California on 7 September 2001, directed by Savage, where it ran with great success for nine months. It then played in Chicago and New York in 2003.^[204] In this adaptation, only one character is female, and all but one of the male characters are gay. A recording was issued in 2002 by Belva Records.^[205] Pinafore Swing is a musical with music arranged by Sarah Travis. It premiered at the Watermill Theatre in England in 2004 in a production directed by John Doyle. The adaptation, set in 1944, changes the characters into members of a band entertaining the sailors on a World War II troop ship in the Atlantic. The reduced-size acting cast also serve as the orchestra for the singing roles, and the music is infused with swing rhythms.^[206] Numerous productions in recent decades have been set to parody Star Trek or Star Wars.^[197]^[207]

Cultural impact [link]

Main article: Cultural influence of Gilbert and Sullivan

W.S. Gilbert in about 1878

Among its other influences on popular culture, Pinafore had perhaps its most profound influence on the development of musical theatre. According to theatre historian John Kenrick, Pinafore "became an international sensation, reshaping the commercial theater in both England and the United States."^[208] Music writer Andrew Lamb notes, "The success of H.M.S. Pinafore in 1879 established British comic opera alongside French opéra bouffe throughout the English-speaking world".^[209] Historian John Bush Jones opines that Pinafore and the other Savoy operas demonstrate that musical theatre "can address contemporary social and political issues without sacrificing entertainment value" and that Pinafore created the model for a new kind of musical theatre, the "integrated" musical, where "book, lyrics, and music combined to form an integral whole".^[210] He adds that its "unprecedented ... popularity fostered an American audience for musical theatre, while the show itself became a model for form, content, and even intention of ... musicals ever since, especially socially relevant musicals."^[211] Its popularity also led to the musical theatre adaptations of Pinafore described above, musicals in which the story line involves a production of Pinafore^[212] and other musicals that parody the opera or that use or adapt its music.^[213]

Likewise, the opera's popularity has led to the widespread parody and pastiche of its songs in politics, literature and films, on television and in a variety of other media.^[214] Many comedians have used Pinafore songs for comic and satiric effect. For example, in his comedy album My Son, the Celebrity, Allan Sherman parodies "When I Was a Lad" from the point of view of a young man who goes to an Ivy League school and then rises to prominence in business. At the end of the song, he "thanks old Yale", "thanks the Lord" and thanks his father, "who is chairman of the board".^[215] Literary references to Pinafore songs include Harris's attempt to sing "When I Was a Lad" in Jerome K. Jerome's Three Men in a Boat.^[216] Another is found in the story "Runaround" from I, Robot by Isaac Asimov, where a robot sings part of "I'm Called Little Buttercup".^[217] Political references include a 1996 satiric pastiche of "When I Was a Lad" aimed at Tony Blair by Virginia Bottomley, heritage secretary under John Major.^[218] Sporting references include a racehorse named "H.M.S. Pinafore".^[219] Pinafore songs and images have been used extensively in advertising. According to Jones, "Pinafore launched the first media blitz in the United States" beginning in 1879,^[134] and recent ads include a television campaign for Terry's Chocolate Orange featuring a pastiche of "When I Was a Lad".^[220] Pinafore-themed merchandise includes trading cards that were created in the 1880s.^[221]

Arthur Seymour Sullivan

Pinafore and its songs have been performed by rock musicians such as Todd Rundgren, Taj Mahal and Michele Rundgren, who performed "Never Mind the Why and Wherefore" on Night Music (Sunday Night) in 1989.^[222]

Film references

In recent decades, songs from Pinafore have been used frequently to give period flavor to films. Prominent examples include the 1981 historical film Chariots of Fire, in which the protagonist, Harold Abrahams, and others from Cambridge University, sing "He Is an Englishman".^[223] This song also features at the end of the 1983 BBC drama An Englishman Abroad.^[224] In the 2003 movie Peter Pan, the Darling family sings "When I Was a Lad".^[225]^[226] In Wyatt Earp (1994), the famed lawman meets his future wife when he sees her playing in an early production of Pinafore.^[227] A 1953 biopic, The Story of Gilbert and Sullivan, uses music from Pinafore.

Characters also sing songs from Pinafore in such popular films as Raiders of the Lost Ark (1981)^[228]^[229] and Star Trek: Insurrection (1998), where Captain Picard and Lt. Commander Worf sing part of "A British Tar" to distract a malfunctioning Lt. Commander Data.^[230] Likewise, in The Good Shepherd (2006), which depicts an all-male version of Pinafore at Yale University, the Matt Damon character plays Little Buttercup, singing her song in falsetto.^[231] Judy Garland sings "I Am the Monarch of the Sea" in the 1963 film, I Could Go On Singing.^[232] The soundtrack of the 1992 thriller The Hand that Rocks the Cradle prominently features songs and music from Pinafore, and the father and daughter characters sing "I Am the Captain of the Pinafore" together.^[233] An example of a film based on ideas from Pinafore is the 1976 animated film by Ronald Searle called Dick Deadeye, or Duty Done is based on the character and songs from Pinafore.^[234] In the 1988 drama Permanent Record, a high school class performs Pinafore.^[235]

Television references

Television series that include substantial Pinafore references include The West Wing, for example in the 2000 episode "And It's Surely to Their Credit", where "He Is an Englishman" is used throughout and quoted in the episode's title.^[236] Among other notable examples of the use of songs from Pinafore on television are several popular animated shows. In the "Cape Feare" episode of The Simpsons, Bart stalls his would-be killer Sideshow Bob with a "final request" that Bob sing him the entire score of Pinafore.^[237] Similarly, the 1993 "HMS Yakko" episode of Animaniacs consists of pastiches of songs from H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance.^[238] In a Family Guy episode, "The Thin White Line" (2001), Stewie sings a pastiche of "My Gallant Crew".^[239] Stewie also sings "I Am the Monarch of the Sea" (including the ladies' part, in falsetto) in "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story".^[240] A 1986 Mr. Belvedere episode, "The Play", concerns a production of H.M.S. Pinafore, and several of the songs are performed.^[241] In the 2009 episode "Broken" of House, Dr. House must take a urine test and starts singing "He is an Englishman" to cover the sound.^[242]

Historical casting [link]

The following tables show the most prominent cast members of significant D'Oyly Carte Opera Company productions and tours at various times through to the company's 1982 closure:^[243]

Role	Opera Comique 1878^[54]	New York 1879^[244]	Savoy Theatre 1887^[106]	Savoy Theatre 1899^[107]	Savoy Theatre 1908^[108]
Sir Joseph	George Grossmith	J. H. Ryley	George Grossmith	Walter Passmore	Charles H. Workman
Captain Corcoran	Rutland Barrington	Sgr. Brocolini	Rutland Barrington	Henry Lytton	Rutland Barrington
Ralph Rackstraw	George Power	Hugh Talbot	J. G. Robertson	Robert Evett	Henry Herbert
Dick Deadeye	Richard Temple	J. Furneaux Cook	Richard Temple	Richard Temple	Henry Lytton
Boatswain/ Bill Bobstay	Fred Clifton	Fred Clifton	Richard Cummings	W. H. Leon	Leicester Tunks
Carpenter/ Bob Beckett	Mr. Dymott	Mr. Cuthbert	Rudolph Lewis	Powis Pinder	Fred Hewett
Midshipmite/ Tom Tucker	Master Fitzaltamont¹
Josephine	Emma Howson	Blanche Roosevelt	Geraldine Ulmar	Ruth Vincent	Elsie Spain
Hebe	Jessie Bond	Jessie Bond	Jessie Bond	Emmie Owen	Jessie Rose
Buttercup	Harriett Everard	Alice Barnett	Rosina Brandram	Rosina Brandram	Louie René

Role	D'Oyly Carte 1915 Tour^[245]	D'Oyly Carte 1925 Tour^[246]	D'Oyly Carte 1935 Tour^[247]	D'Oyly Carte 1950 Tour^[248]
Sir Joseph	Henry Lytton	Henry Lytton	Martyn Green	Martyn Green
Captain Corcoran	Leicester Tunks	Leo Sheffield	Leslie Rands	Richard Watson
Ralph Rackstraw	Walter Glynne	Charles Goulding	John Dean	Herbert Newby
Dick Deadeye	Leo Sheffield	Darrell Fancourt	Darrell Fancourt	Darrell Fancourt
Boatswain	Frederick Hobbs	Henry Millidge	Richard Walker	Stanley Youngman
Carpenter	George Sinclair	Patrick Colbert	L. Radley Flynn	L. Radley Flynn
Josephine	Phyllis Smith	Elsie Griffin	Ann Drummond-Grant	Muriel Harding
Hebe	Nellie Briercliffe	Aileen Davies	Marjorie Eyre	Joan Gillingham
Buttercup	Bertha Lewis	Bertha Lewis	Dorothy Gill	Ella Halman

Role	D'Oyly Carte 1958 Tour^[249]	D'Oyly Carte 1965 Tour^[250]	D'Oyly Carte 1975 Tour^[251]	D'Oyly Carte 1982 Tour^[252]
Sir Joseph	Peter Pratt	John Reed	John Reed	James Conroy-Ward^[253]
Captain Corcoran	Jeffrey Skitch	Alan Styler	Michael Rayner	Clive Harre
Ralph Rackstraw	Thomas Round	David Palmer	Meston Reid	Meston Reid
Dick Deadeye	Donald Adams	Donald Adams	John Ayldon	John Ayldon
Boatswain	George Cook	George Cook	Jon Ellison	Michael Buchan
Carpenter	Jack Habbick	Anthony Raffell	John Broad	Michael Lessiter
Josephine	Jean Hindmarsh	Ann Hood	Pamela Field	Vivian Tierney
Hebe	Joyce Wright	Pauline Wales	Patricia Leonard	Roberta Morrell
Buttercup	Ann Drummond-Grant	Christene Palmer	Lyndsie Holland	Patricia Leonard

¹ The Midshipmite, Tom Tucker, is traditionally played by a child. "Fitzaltamont" was likely a pseudonym used to protect the child's identity, as the same name appears on programmes of several provincial touring companies.^[54] No names are listed for his role in later productions.

Notes [link]

^ Ainger, pp. 107–08
^ Ainger, p. 130
^ Ainger, pp. 110, 119–20 and 130–31; Jacobs, p. 109
^ ^a ^b Ainger, p. 157
^ Jacobs, pp. 113–14
^ Jacobs, p. 111; Ainger, pp. 133–34
^ Jacobs, p. 113
^ Ainger, p. 145
^ Bradley (1996), p. 115
^ Fitz-Gerald, p. 35
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Allen (1975), Introduction to chapter on Pinafore
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Stedman, p. 161
^ ^a ^b ^c Jacobs, pp. 114–15
^ Gilbert's satire of politicians had led to censorship of Gilbert's plays before, for example The Happy Land, Stedman, pp. 106–10
^ Jacobs, p. 115. The Prime Minister, Benjamin Disraeli, began to refer to his appointee as "Pinafore Smith". See, e.g., Dark & Grey, p. 75; and Gary Dexter, "How HMS Pinafore got its name", The Sunday Telegraph, 1 October 2008
^ Stedman, p. 108
^ Stedman, pp. 129 and 155
^ Stedman, pp. 157–58; Crowther, p. 90; Ainger, p. 154
^ Crowther, pp. 87–89
^ Crowther, p. 90
^ Stedman, p. 155
^ Jacobs, p. 117
^ Ainger, p. 155
^ Bradley (1996), pp. 115–16
^ Stedman, p. 159
^ Jacobs, p. 117–18
^ Mrs. Paul, nee Isabella Featherstone (1833–1879), had left her husband around 1877, as he was having an affair with the actress-dancer Letty Lind, with whom he sired two children. However, she continued performing under this name. See Cruickshank, Graeme. "The Life and Loves of Letty Lind" in The Gaiety, Issue 22, Summer 2007
^ Ainger, pp. 156–57
^ ^a ^b Stedman, p. 160
^ The dialogue that was cut was based on lines from Gilbert's 1877 farce On Bail; it would be revised again and used as part of Patience in 1881 (see Stedman, p. 160).
^ Cox-Ife, William. W. S. Gilbert: Stage Director. Dobson, 1978 ISBN 0-234-77206-9. See also Gilbert, W. S., "A Stage Play", and Bond, Jessie, Reminiscences, Introduction.
^ ^a ^b The traditional British pronunciation, "rafe" (/ˈreɪf/), is important because it rhymes with "waif" in the lyrics of Little Buttercup's Act II song, "A many years ago".
^ "Big D meant "damn". See Bradley (1996), p. 128. In Act II, the Captain does use a big D, which shocks Sir Joseph and his female relatives.
^ Ainger, pp. 157–58
^ After opening night, the company's musical director, Alfred Cellier, conducted most of the performances. Eugène Goossens conducted the piece in late July and August 1878, while Cellier was assisting Sullivan at the promenade concerts at Covent Garden. See advertisements in The Era on 21 July 1878, p. 8; 28 July 1878, p. 8; and 4 August 1878, p. 8.
^ Bond, Jessie. "The Life and Reminiscences of Jessie Bond", Chapter 4, John Lane, 1930, accessed 10 March 2009
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Bradley (1996), p. 116
^ Ainger, p. 160
^ ^a ^b Jacobs, p. 122
^ Joseph, p. 17
^ The Times, 6 July 1878, p. 1 announced that Eugène Goossens would conduct.
^ Ainger, p. 162
^ Jones, p. 6
^ Stedman, p. 163
^ "Opera Comique". The Era, 9 February 1879, reprinted at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 8 July 2010
^ Stedman, p. 170–71
^ Ainger, pp. 165–67 and 194–95
^ Lawrence, Arthur H. "An illustrated interview with Sir Arthur Sullivan" Part 3, from The Strand Magazine, Vol. xiv, No.84 (December 1897), accessed 10 March 2009
^ Ainger, p. 166
^ Stedman, p. 165
^ ^a ^b ^c Ainger, p. 169
^ Jacobs, p. 126
^ Rees, p. 89: Sullivan wrote to John Hollingshead, saying: "You once settled a precedent for me which may just at present be of great importance to me. I asked you for the band parts of the Merry Wives of Windsor ... and [you] said, 'They are yours, as our run is over....' Now will you please let me have them, and the parts of Thespis also at once. I am detaining the parts of Pinafore, so that the directors shall not take them away from the Comique tomorrow, and I base my claim on the precedent you set."
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Rollins and Witts, p. 6
^ Ainger, p. 170
^ Jacobs, pp. 124–25
^ Stedman, pp. 170–71
^ "The Fracas at the Opera Comique", The Theatre, 1 September 1879, reprinted at the Stage Beauty website, accessed 6 May 2009. See also "The Fracas at the Opera Comique", The Era, 10 August 1879, p. 5 and "The Fracas at the Opera Comique", The Leeds Mercury, 13 August 1879, p. 8.
^ ^a ^b Cellier and Bridgeman, chapter entitled "The making of H.M.S. Pinafore", reproduced at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Ainger, p. 171
^ "The Theatres". The Times, 22 September 1879, reprinted at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 8 July 2010
^ Ainger, p. 175
^ Stedman, p. 172
^ Ainger, p. 184
^ Gillan, Don. "Longest Running Plays in London and New York", StageBeauty.net (2007), accessed 10 March 2009
^ Who's Who in the Theatre, Fourteenth edition, ed. Freda Gaye, p. 1530, Pitman, London (1967) ISBN 0-273-43345-8
^ Prestige, Colin. "D'Oyly Carte and the Pirates: The Original New York Productions of Gilbert and Sullivan", pp. 113–48 at p. 118, Gilbert and Sullivan Papers Presented at the International Conference held at the University of Kansas in May 1970, Edited by James Helyar. Lawrence, Kansas: University of Kansas Libraries, 1971.
^ ^a ^b ^c Jones, p. 7
^ Allen (1979), p. 2
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e ^f ^g ^h Kanthor, Harold. "H.M.S. Pinafore and the Theater Season in Boston 1878–1879", Journal of Popular Culture, Spring 1991, vol. 24, no. 4, Platinum Periodicals, p. 119
^ Stedman, p. 169
^ Rosen, Zvi S. "The Twilight of the Opera Pirates: A Prehistory of the Right of Public Performance for Musical Compositions", Cardozo Arts & Entertainment Law Journal, Vol. 24, 2007, pp. 1157–1218, 5 March 2007, accessed 6 May 2009
^ Ainger, p. 168
^ Ford had been one of the few managers who had paid Gilbert and Sullivan any kind of fee for performing Pinafore in America, and his reward for a small gesture was great (Stedman, p. 169).
^ ^a ^b Jacobs, p. 129
^ ^a ^b ^c Ainger, pp. 182–83
^ Jacobs, p. 127
^ Stedman, p. 174
^ ^a ^b Stedman, p. 175
^ Kanthor, Hal. Links to programme for Carte's "Children's Pinafore", Gilbert and Sullivan: From London to America, online exhibition at University of Rochester Libraries, accessed 7 May 2009
^ ^a ^b Rollins and Witts, p. 7
^ Scott, Clement. "Our Play-Box. The Children's Pinafore", The Theatre, 1 January 1880, new [3rd.] series 1: pp. 38–39, accessed 10 March 2009
^ "The Children's Pinafore", , The Era, 26 December 1880, reprinted at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 6 October 2011
^ Carroll, Lewis. "The Stage and the Spirit of Reverence", Theatre magazine, 1 June 1888, reprinted in The Lewis Carroll Picture Book, pp. 175–95, Stuart Dodgson Collingwood (ed.), London: T. Fisher Unwin (1899)
^ Jacobs, p. 123
^ Rollins and Witts, pp. 7–164
^ Bradley (2005), p. 27
^ ^a ^b Rollins and Witts, Appendix p. VII
^ Mander, pp. 102–105
^ Rollins and Witts, p. 165
^ Rollins and Witts, pp. 165–72
^ Rollins and Witts, pp. 172–86, and supplements
^ "The 1968 D'Oyly Carte Opera Company Production of The Gondoliers", reprinted from theatre programme of 29 January 1968, The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, Retrieved on 11 March 2009
^ It played in London together with Pirates at Her Majesty's Theatre; Mander, p. 154 and "H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance", Theatre World (UK magazine), March 1962, pp. 15–20
^ Photos, cast and crew information for the New Sadler's Wells Opera production in 1987, collected at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Traubner, Richard. "A Pinafore Sails In on a Fresh Breeze", The New York Times, 15 January 1989, accessed 10 March 2009
^ ^a ^b Bradley (2005), chapters 3 and 4, passim
^ "Dido; Aeneas/ Acis; Galatea", The Times, 28 March 2009
^ ^a ^b "Fun on the high seas". The Press and Journal, 22 April 2010, accessed 27 April 2010
^ Review of the original authorised Australian Pinafore in the Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 1879, reproduced at the Gilbert and Sullivan Down Under website, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Morrison, Robert. "The J. C. Williamson Gilbert and Sullivan Opera Company", at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 12 November 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ ^a ^b Bradley (1996), p. 117
^ IBDB links to Broadway productions of Pinafore, Internet Broadway Database, accessed 13 June 2009
^ Smith, Steve. "All Hands on Deck for Absurd Relevance", The New York Times, June 9, 2008, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Bradley (2005), chapter 4
^ ^a ^b Rollins and Witts, p. 11
^ ^a ^b Rollins and Witts, p.18
^ ^a ^b Rollins and Witts, p. 22
^ "Opera Comique", The Era, 2 June 1878, Country Edition, 40(2071): p. 5, cols. 1–2
^ ^a ^b "London Theatres. Opera Comique", The Entr'acte and Limelight: Theatrical and Musical Critic and Advertiser, 1 June 1878, 466: p. 12
^ ^a ^b Pinafore parodies the baby-switching plot device in Il Trovatore. See, e.g., Gurewitsch, Matthew. "There Will Always Be a Trovatore", The New York Times, 24 December 2000, accessed 22 April 2009
^ "Opera Comique", The Illustrated London News, 1 June 1878, 72(2031): 515
^ The Times, 27 May 1878, p. 6
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Walbrook, chapter V
^ "Opera-Comique", The Musical Times, 1 June 1878, 19(424): 329
^ The Academy, 13 July 1878, new series 14(323): p. 49, col. 3
^ Baily, p. 250
^ "The Playhouses", The Illustrated London News, 19 November 1887, 91(2535): 580, col. 1
^ "Our Omnibus-Box", The Theatre, New Series, 1 December 1887, 10: 337
^ The Athenæum, 10 June 1899, 3737: 730–731
^ Mencken, H. L. "Pinafore at 33", Baltimore Evening Sun, 1911, reproduced at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 10 March 2009
^ "H.M.S. Pinafore. Revival at Princes Theatre, The Times, 21 January 1920, p. 10
^ "H.M.S. Pinafore. Sullivan Opera Season Nearing The End", The Times, 3 January 1922, p. 8
^ "Novelty and Tradition in Savoy Operettas", The Times, 12 December 1961, p. 5
^ Sydney Morning Herald, 17 November 1879
^ Bradley (2005), p. 73
^ "H.M.S. Pinafore Again Delights the Danes", The Times, 16 October 1959, p. 16
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Bradley (2005), Chapter 4, describing numerous productions beginning with 1962.
^ "A New Approach to H.M.S. Pinafore", The Times, 9 March 1960, p. 13
^ "H.M.S. Pinafore a la Hippodrome; They Sail the Ocean Tank and Their Saucy Ship's a Beauty", The New York Times, 10 April 1914, p. 13
^ Atkinson, J. Brooks, "G. & S., Incorporated", The New York Times, 25 April 1926, p. X1
^ Smith, Steve. "All Hands on Deck for Absurd Relevance", The New York Times, 9 June 2008
^ Sobelsohn, David. "H.M.S. Pinafore - W.S. Gilbert/Arthur Sullivan", CultureVulture.net, June 11, 2005, accessed 10 March 2009
^ ^a ^b ^c Jones, p. 8
^ "The Original Rackstraw", The Era, 18 July 1908, p. 15
^ "Pinafore focuses on mirth and silliness", Deseret News, 10 November 2005, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Benford, Harry. The Gilbert & Sullivan Lexicon, Third Edition, p. 39, Houston: Queensbury Press (1999) ISBN 0-9667916-1-4
^ Crowther, Andrew. "Hunchbacks, Misanthropes and Outsiders: Gilbert's Self-Image", Gilbert and Sullivan Boys and Girls (GASBAG) no. 206 (Winter 1998)
^ Ainger, p. 83
^ ^a ^b Interview of Stuart Maunder, The Music Show, ABC Radio National, Australia, 14 May 2005, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Jacobs notes that Gilbert is lampooning the tradition of nautical melodrama in which the sailor's "patriotism guarantees his virtue". Jacobs, p. 118
^ Crowther makes a point similar to Maunder's: "[T]hough Gilbert intended [the song] as a devastating parody of patriotic songs, the fervour of Sullivan's music often leads people to believe it a sincerely-meant patriotic song; and as the words and music pull the song in opposite directions the listener is left in a curiously ambiguous position, moved and amused simultaneously." Crowther, Andrew. "The Land Where Contradictions Meet", W. S. Gilbert Society Journal, vol. 2, no. 11, p. 330, Autumn 2000
^ Stedman, pp. 106–10
^ Lawrence, pp. 166–67
^ Fischler, Alan. Modified Rapture: comedy in W. S. Gilbert's Savoy operas, pp. 91–92, Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1991
^ Lawrence, p. 181
^ ^a ^b "Savoy Theatre: The Sullivan Opera Season, H.M.S. Pinafore", The Times, 10 December 1929, p. 14
^ Lawrence, pp. 180–81
^ ^a ^b ^c Stedman, p. 162
^ ^a ^b ^c ^d ^e Crowther, Andrew. "The Land Where Contradictions Meet", W. S. Gilbert Society Journal, vol. 2, no. 11, pp. 325–31, Autumn 2000 (discussing the views of various scholars).
^ Crowther notes that Alexis in The Sorcerer is also such a "misguided superior". See also Stedman, p. 162
^ See also Jones, p. 8
^ ^a ^b ^c Jacobs, p. 118
^ ^a ^b "'HMS Pinafore' - the Comic Opera", Edited Guide Entry from The Lives and Works of Gilbert and Sullivan, BBC h2g2, 24 August 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ ^a ^b Jacobs, p. 119
^ Williamson, p. 63
^ Shepherd, Marc. List of compilation discs of Gilbert and Sullivan songs by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 24 December 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd Marc. List of compilation discs of Gilbert and Sullivan Songs by other producers at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 7 November 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Jacobs, p. 119. Gilbert had introduced this character in his 1870 Bab Ballad "The Bumboat Woman's Story".
^ Hughes, p. 53
^ Hughes, p. 55
^ Hughes, p. 133
^ Jacobs, quoted in Holden, p. 1060
^ Hulme, quoted in Sadie, vol. 2, p. 727
^ ^a ^b Perry, Helga J. "Lost Pinafore Song Found", "Reflect my Child" reconstruction, The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, 15 April 1999, accessed 21 April 2009
^ Miller, Bruce. "Comments on the Lost Song Discovery", at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, 17 April 1999, accessed 21 April 2009
^ ^a ^b DeOrsey, Stan. "Gilbert & Sullivan: Of Ballads, Songs and Snatches (Lost or seldom recorded) at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 2003, accessed 21 April 2009
^ Hebe's cut dialogue after Nos. 14 and 19 at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 21 April 2009
^ ^a ^b Young, Percy M. (ed.) "H.M.S. Pinafore", critical edition, 2003, 2 vols., Broude Brothers Limited ISBN 0-8450-3003-5
^ Shepherd, Marc. Hebe's Dialogue Introduction at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 21 April 2009
^ ^a ^b ^c Shepherd, Marc. "Recordings of H.M.S. Pinafore" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 5 April 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ The first phonoscènes in the UK were presented at Buckingham Palace in 1907 and included the captain's song and chorus. See Schmitt, Thomas. The Genealogy of Clip Culture, in Henry Keazor and Thorsten Wübbena (eds.) Rewind, Play, Fast Forward: The Past, Present and Future of the Music Video, transcript Verlag (2010), pp. 45 et seq., ISBN 978-3-8376-1185-4
^ Bradley (2005), p. 16
^ ^a ^b Buckley, Jonathan (ed). The Rough Guide to Classical Music (1994 edition, ISBN 1-85828-113-X), p. 367; Chislett, W. A. The Gramophone, February 1960, p. 70, accessed 10 March 2009; March, Ivan (ed). The Great Records, Long Playing Record Library, 1967, pp. 100–01; March, Ivan (ed). Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music, 2008, ISBN 0-14-103336-3, p. 1136
^ March, Ivan (ed). Penguin Guide to Recorded Classical Music, 2008
^ ^a ^b Shepherd, Marc. "The New D'Oyly Carte Pinafore (2000)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 12 November 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "Den Gode Fregat Pinafore (1957)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 24 December 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The 1939 NBC Pinafore Broadcast", A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 31 December 1999, accessed 3 June 2009
^ ^a ^b Shepherd, Marc. "The 1973 D'Oyly Carte Pinafore Video" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 24 December 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. Brent Walker Pinafore video at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 5 April 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Brent Walker Productions filmed a series of television productions of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas in 1982 and 1983. See Shepherd, Marc. "The Brent Walker Videos", A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, accessed 28 April 2009. This is the most complete professional set of Gilbert and Sullivan videos. See Shepherd, Marc. "G&S Discography Video Index", A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, accessed 28 April 2009.
^ "The G&S Opera Company - Live Recordings from The Festivals" Musical Collectibles catalogue website, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The 1922 HMV Pinafore" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 5 April 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The 1930 D'Oyly Carte Pinafore" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 10 May 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The 1949 D'Oyly Carte Pinafore" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 8 July 2005, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The Sargent/Glyndebourne Pinafore (1958)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 16 November 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The 1960 D'Oyly Pinafore" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 24 December 2003, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. Review "The G&S For All Pinafore (1972)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 17 June 2002, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The Stratford Festival Pinafore (1981)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 24 October 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The New Sadler's Wells Pinafore (1987)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 2 December 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The Mackerras/Telarc Pinafore (1994)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 31 December 1999, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The Essgee Pinafore (1997)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 7 November 2001, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Stedman, p. 331
^ Gilbert, W. S. The Pinafore Picture Book, London: George Bell and Sons, 1908, a children's retelling of Pinafore
^ Dillard, pp. 103–05 lists five.
^ Kaufman, George S. Hollywood Pinafore or the Lad Who Loved a Salary, Dramatists Play Service (1998) ISBN 0-8222-1647-7
^ ^a ^b ^c Bradley (2005), p. 170
^ Shepard, Richard F. "Don Walker, 81, an Orchestrator of Broadway Musical Comedies," The New York Times, September 13, 1989, accessed July 20, 2009
^ Falkenstein, Michelle. "Yiddish Sails the Ocean Blue", Hadassah Magazine, April 2000, Vol. 81, No. 8, accessed 14 November 2009
^ Bradley (2005), p. 172
^ "Think British, Sing Yiddish", The New York Theatre Wire, August 2000, accessed 14 November 2009
^ Essgee Entertainment Pinafore pages Essgee Entertainment, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Bradley (2005), Chapter 4
^ Bradley (2005), pp. 170–71
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The Celebration Theater Pinafore! (2002)" at A Gilbert and Sullivan Discography, 3 June 2002, accessed 10 March 2009
^ "Watermill - Pinafore Swing", Collected newspaper reviews of Pinafore Swing, reprinted at the Newbury theatre guide archive, accessed 10 March 2009
^ Taylor, Pat. "I caught two light n’ lively, very funny productions last week" . The Tolucan Times, 19 May 2010
^ Kenrick, John. "Gilbert & Sullivan 101: The G&S Canon", The Cyber Encyclopedia of Musical Theatre, TV and Film, accessed 10 March 2009. See also Gänzl (1995).
^ Lamb, p. 35
^ Jones, pp. 10–11
^ Jones, pp. 4–5
^ Bradley (2005), p. 8
^ A 1938 Broadway show Knights of Song, used six songs from Pinafore. Other examples include The Pirates of Pinafore, The Pinafore Pirates (which Bradley calls "splendid" and describes in detail in Bradley (2005), pp. 174–75), Mutiny on the Pinafore, and H.M.S. Dumbledore, all described at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 7 May 2009.
^ Bradley (2005), chapter 8
^ Sherman, Allan. My Son, the Celebrity (1963). On his next album, Sherman sings a song called "Little Butterball" to the tune of "I'm Called Little Buttercup". See Sherman, Allan. Track listing from Allan in Wonderland (1964), accessed 10 March 2009
^ "Three Men in a Boat", chapter 8, accessed 24 April 2009
^ Asimov, Isaac. I, Robot, New York: Doubleday & Company, 1950. For examples of references to Pinafore in several novels, see Bradley (2005), pp. 10–11. Other literary references include Gilbert's own 1908 children's book, The Pinafore Picture Book, London: George Bell and Sons, 1908, accessed 1 May 2009. In addition, Gilbert and Sullivan refer to Pinafore in two of their subsequent operas: in the "Major-General's Song" from their next opera, Pirates, and with the appearance of an older "Captain Corcoran, KCB", in Utopia, Limited, the only recurring character in the G&S canon.
^ Bradley (2005), p. 166
^ Racing: York Meeting, The Times, 21 May 1946, p. 2
^ Bradley (2005), p. 167
^ Pinafore advertising cards at The Gilbert and Sullivan Archive, accessed 10 March 2009
^ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5m33BXNHIHM YouTube recording of "Never mind the why and Wherefore", sung by Todd Rundgren, Taj Mahal and Michele Rundgren, on October 29, 1989
^ Track listing for Chariots of Fire, IMDB database, accessed on 18 July 2008
^ Boston Phoenix review of Alan Bennett retrospective, accessed on 4 February 2009
^ Track listing for Peter Pan (2003), IMDB database, accessed on 18 July 2008
^ Explanation of context of "When I Was a Lad" in Peter Pan (2003), IMDB database, accessed on 18 July 2008
^ Bradley (2005), p. 12
^ Soundtrack information for Raiders of the Lost Ark, IMDB database, accessed on 18 July 2008
^ Perry, Michelle P. "Light-hearted, happy entertainment from HMS Pinafore", The Tech, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 12 October 1990, accessed on 18 July 2008
^ Track listing for Star Trek: Insurrection, IMDB database, accessed on 18 July 2008
^ Track listing for The Good Shepherd, IMDB database, accessed on 18 July 2008
^ Krafsur, Richard P., Kenneth White Munden and American Film Institute (eds.) I Could Go On Singing in The American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1961–1970, p. 514, Berkeley: University of California Press (1997) ISBN 0-520-20970-2
^ Track listing for The Hand that Rocks the Cradle, IMDB database, accessed on 27 August 2008
^ "Dick Deadeye, or Duty Done (1975)", Time Out Film Guide, accessed 7 May 2009
^ Permanent Record (1988) at the IMDB database
^ "The West Wing episode summary – And It's Surely to Their Credit", TV.com, CNET Networks, Inc., accessed 10 March 2009
^ Arnold, p. 16
^ "H.M.S. Yakko", Animaniacs (FOX Kids), 15 September 1993, no. 3, season 1
^ Callaghan, Steve. "The Thin White Line", Family Guy: The Official Episode Guide Seasons 1–3, pp. 128–31, New York: HarperCollins (2005) ISBN 0-06-083305-X
^ "Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story", Description of the film at planet-familyguy.com, accessed 19 October 2009
^ The episode was first broadcast on 28 March 1986, the last episode of Season 2. "Mr. Belevedere: The Play", soundtrack details at the IMDB database, accessed 19 October 2009
^ "'Broken' – 2-Hour Season Premiere", House, accessed 8 February 2012
^ Rollins and Witts (and supplements). An examination of Rollins and Witts and Gänzl (1986) shows that cast lists taken at ten-year intervals is sufficient to indicate the bulk of the notable performers who portrayed these roles in authorized productions during that period.
^ Rollins and Witts, p. 32
^ Rollins and Witts, p. 132
^ Rollins and Witts, p. 148
^ Rollins and Witts, p. 160
^ Rollins and Witts, p. 175
^ Rollins and Witts, p. 183
^ Rollins and Witts, 1st Supplement, p. 6
^ Rollins and Witts, 3rd Supplement, p. 28
^ Rollins and Witts, 4th Supplement, p. 42
^ John Reed played Sir Joseph at some performances during the final London season at the Adelphi Theatre. See Stone, David. John Reed profile at Who Was Who in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, 21 August 2006, accessed on 27 April 2009

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Dark, Sidney; Rowland Grey (1923). W. S. Gilbert: His Life and Letters. Methuen & Co. Ltd. ISBN 0-405-08430-7.
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Fitz-Gerald, S. J. Adair (1924). The Story of the Savoy Opera. Stanley Paul & Co., Ltd. ISBN 0-306-79543-4.
Gänzl, Kurt (1986). The British Musical Theatre – Volume I: 1865–1914. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-520509-X.
Gänzl, Kurt (1995). Gänzl's Book of the Broadway Musical: 75 Favorite Shows, from H.M.S. Pinafore to Sunset Boulevard. Schirmer. ISBN 0-02-870832-6.
Holden, Amanda; (editor), with Kenyon, Nicholas and Walsh, Stephen (1993). The Viking Opera Guide. Viking. ISBN 0-670-81292-7.
Hughes, Gervase (1960). The Music of Arthur Sullivan. New York: St. Martin's Press. http://www.archive.org/details/musicofarthursul006476mbp.
Jacobs, Arthur (1986). Arthur Sullivan – A Victorian Musician. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-282033-8.
Jones, John Bush (2003). Our Musicals Ourselves. Brandeis University Press. ISBN 1-58465-311-6.
Joseph, Tony (2004). The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company 1875–1982. Bunthorne Books. ISBN 0-9507992-1-1.
Lamb, Andrew (Spring 1986). "From Pinafore to Porter: United States – United Kingdom Interactions in Musical Theater, 1879–1929". American Music 4 (1): 34–49. DOI:10.2307/3052183. JSTOR 3052183.
Lawrence, Elwood P. (December 1971). "The Happy Land: W. S. Gilbert as Political Satirist". Victorian Studies 15 (2): 161–83. JSTOR 3825977.
Mander, Raymond; Joe Richardson (1962). A Picture history of Gilbert and Sullivan. Vista Books.
Rees, Terence (1964). Thespis – A Gilbert & Sullivan Enigma. London: Dillon's University Bookshop.
Rollins, Cyril; R. John Witts (1962). The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in Gilbert and Sullivan Operas: A Record of Productions, 1875–1961. Michael Joseph. Also, five supplements, privately printed.
Sadie, Stanley (ed) (1992). The New Grove Dictionary of Opera. Oxford University Press. ISBN [[Special:BookSources/0-19-522186-2|0-19-522186-2]].
Stedman, Jane W. (1996). W. S. Gilbert, A Classic Victorian & His Theatre. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0-19-816174-3.
Walbrook, H. M. (1922). Gilbert & Sullivan Opera, A History and a Comment. F. V. White & Co. Ltd. http://math.boisestate.edu/GaS/books/walbrook/index.html. Retrieved 24 June 2009.
Williamson, Audrey (1953). Gilbert and Sullivan Opera. London: Marion Boyars. ISBN 0-7145-2766-1.

External links [link]

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H.M.S. Pinafore

Information

Images

Audio

1930 London Recording in Public Domain

Gilbert and Sullivan

The Triumvirate

W. S. Gilbert • Arthur Sullivan • Richard D'Oyly Carte

The Gilbert and Sullivan operas

Thespis • Trial by Jury • The Sorcerer • H.M.S. Pinafore • The Pirates of Penzance • Patience • Iolanthe • Princess Ida The Mikado • Ruddigore • The Yeomen of the Guard • The Gondoliers • Utopia, Limited • The Grand Duke

Other works, people and related matters

Other works by W. S. Gilbert • Other operas by Arthur Sullivan • Other music by Arthur Sullivan • Savoy opera
People associated with Gilbert and Sullivan • Gilbert and Sullivan performers
D'Oyly Carte Opera Company • Helen Carte • Rupert D'Oyly Carte • Bridget D'Oyly Carte
Cultural influence of Gilbert and Sullivan • International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival • Works about Gilbert and Sullivan • Adaptations of works by Gilbert and Sullivan

G&S Portal

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Royston Hulbert Nash (born July 23, 1933) is an English-born conductor, best known as a music director of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.

Beginning as a conductor with the Royal Marines from 1957 to 1970. He then joined D'Oyly Carte, becoming Music Director from 1971 to 1979. There, he led the company during its centenary year in 1975 and issued a number of recordings, including the company's only recordings of Utopia, Limited, The Grand Duke, and The Zoo, as well as recordings of some rarely-heard Sullivan music. He then moved to the U.S., where he became musical director of the Nashua Symphony Orchestra for 21 years and the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra for 27 years. He also founded and conducted Symphony by the Sea and Boston Conservatory of Music. He still resides in the U.S.

1 Early life and career
2 D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
3 Recordings
4 Notes
5 References

Early life and career [link]

Nash was born in Southampton and grew up in Bournemouth. At the age of sixteen, he joined the Royal Marines School of Music, remaining there for six years and receiving a Licentiate of the Royal Academy of Music in conducting.^[1] He then studied the trumpet under George Eskdale for a year at the Royal Academy of Music, where he as awarded the Certificate of Merit for Conducting in 1957.^[2] He also held the Bronze Medal of the Worshipful Company of Musicians. His mentors included Rudolf Kempe, Constantin Silvestri and Sir Malcolm Sargent.^[3]

After this training, he was appointed Bandmaster with the Royal Marines, where he served for three years as Director of Music to the Commander-in-Chief, Mediterranean, also conducting the Malta Choral Society. He was then Director of Music to the Commander-in-Chief, Portsmouth.^[4] Then, with the rank of captain, he was appointed Director of Music at the Royal Marines School of Music in Deal, Kent, when he conducted a section of the Royal Marines Band at Sadler's Wells Theatre during a first-act performance of H.M.S. Pinafore at the last night of the London Season of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in March 1970.^[2]^[1]

D'Oyly Carte Opera Company [link]

In September 1970, Nash joined the D'Oyly Carte company as assistant musical director to James Walker, whom he succeeded as musical director in March 1971 when Walker returned to his previous work as a producer for Decca. Nash continued with the company until April 1979.^[1] He was in charge of the centenary season at the Savoy Theatre in 1975 where all the Gilbert and Sullivan operas from Trial by Jury to The Grand Duke were presented in chronological order. Nash was joined by guest conductors Isidore Godfrey (for H.M.S. Pinafore) and Sir Charles Mackerras (The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado)^[5] He led an American tour by the company in 1976. In 1977, during Queen Elizabeth II's Jubilee Year, the company gave a Royal Command Performance at Windsor Castle, conducted by Nash.^[6]

Nash then moved to North America and became musical director of the Nashua Symphony Orchestra in Nashua, New Hampshire, for 21 years, ending with the 2006/7 season,^[7] and of the Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra in Massachusetts from 1980 to 2007. He was also the founder and, until 1995, music director and conductor of Symphony by the Sea, also in Massachusetts, and conductor at the Boston Conservatory of Music in 1985 and 1986.^[3]

Recordings [link]

With D'Oyly Carte, Nash conducted a filmed performance of H.M.S. Pinafore in 1973 and Decca recordings of The Mikado (1973), Iolanthe (1974), Trial by Jury (1975), Utopia Limited (1976), The Grand Duke (1976), The Gondoliers (1977), Cox and Box, the world premiere professional recording of The Zoo (1978), and The Yeomen of the Guard (1979). The Royal Philharmonic Orchestra was engaged for all these recordings, and Nash and the company took the opportunity to record some of Sullivan’s non-Savoy music as fillers in these recordings: the Macbeth Overture, two excerpts from the Henry VIII music, a cut version of the Marmion Overture, the "Imperial March" (instead of the Utopia overture) and the Ballet Suite No 1 from Victoria and Merrie England.^[8]^[1]

Notes [link]

^ ^a ^b ^c ^d Stone, David. Royston Nash at Who Was Who in the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, 3 February 2002, accessed 4 May 2012
^ ^a ^b The Savoyard
^ ^a ^b Cape Symphony website
^ Ayre, p. 248
^ Savoy Theatre programme booklets, March and April 1975.
^ The Savoyard, vol. XVI, no. 2, September 1977, p. 18
^ Nashua Symphony website
^ Shepherd, Marc. "The D'Oyly Carte Stereo Recordings", the Gilbert & Sullivan Discography, accessed 4 May 2012

References [link]

Ayre, Leslie (1972). The Gilbert & Sullivan Companion. London: W.H. Allen & Co Ltd.
Article in The Savoyard, May 1977, pp. 11–14.
Photo of Nash in Massachusetts in 2011 at the CCSO's 50th Anniversary

v t e Cape Cod Symphony Orchestra Music Directors

Royston Nash (1980) Jung-Ho Pak (2007)

Persondata
Name	Nash, Royston
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth	23 July 1933
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

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Medal record
Richard Sheldon
Men's athletics
Competitor for the United States
Olympic Games
Gold	Paris 1900	Shot Put
Bronze	Paris 1900	Discus

Richard Sheldon (July 9, 1878 - January 23, 1935) was the winner of the gold medal in the men's shot put at the 1900 Summer Olympics held in Paris, France. Sheldon, an American, won with a throw of 14.10 m. He also won a bronze medal in the discus throw. Brother of Lewis Sheldon.

References [link]

Olympic Champions in Men's Shot Put

1896: Robert Garrett (USA)
1900: Richard Sheldon (USA)
1904: Ralph Rose (USA)
1908: Ralph Rose (USA)
1912: Pat McDonald (USA)
1920: Ville Pörhölä (FIN)
1924: Bud Houser (USA)
1928: John Kuck (USA)
1932: Leo Sexton (USA)
1936: Hans Woellke (GER)
1948: Wilbur Thompson (USA)
1952: Parry O'Brien (USA)
1956: Parry O'Brien (USA)
1960: Bill Nieder (USA)
1964: Dallas Long (USA)
1968: Randy Matson (USA)
1972: Władysław Komar (POL)
1976: Udo Beyer (GDR)
1980: Vladimir Kiselyov (URS)
1984: Alessandro Andrei (ITA)
1988: Ulf Timmermann (GDR)
1992: Mike Stulce (USA)
1996: Randy Barnes (USA)
2000: Arsi Harju (FIN)
2004: Yuriy Bilonoh (UKR)
2008: Tomasz Majewski (POL)

Persondata
Name	Sheldon, Richard
Alternative names
Short description	Athletics (sport) competitor
Date of birth	July 9, 1878
Place of birth
Date of death	January 23, 1935
Place of death

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Dan Knechtges is a director and choreographer, for musicals, opera, television, film and music videos.^[1]

Life and career [link]

Knechtges is from Grafton, Ohio and is a graduate of Midview High School and Otterbein College (1994), with a degree in musical theatre.^[2]^[3] As a child, he took dance lessons in Elyria, Ohio, where his sister was taking lessons.^[4] Immediately after college, he moved to New York where he began to work as a dancer and teacher, and soon he was getting choreography jobs,^[2] including eight of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas for the Blue Hill Troupe.^[1]

Knechtges' work on Broadway as choreographer includes the musicals The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), Xanadu (2007), 110 in the Shade (2007 revival), You May Now Worship Me (Special benefit concert, 2008), and Sondheim on Sondheim (2010). He received nominations for the Tony Award, Best Choreography and Drama Desk Award, Outstanding Choreography for Xanadu. Knechtges' choreography for Sondheim on Sondheim was praised for making "excellent use of multiple layers offered to him by set designer Beowulf Boritt."^[5]

His off-Broadway work includes Nerds (2005); The 25th Annual Putnam County Spelling Bee (2005), for which he received the Lucille Lortel Award nomination, Outstanding Choreographer; Vanities: A New Musical (2009) (also at Theatreworks, California); and Citizen Ruth (New York International Fringe Festival, 2009).^[6] In regional theatre, he choreographed The Girl in the Frame at the Norma Terris Theatre in Chester, Connecticut (2005)^[7] and both directed and choreographed Give It Up!, with a book by Douglas Carter Beane at the Dallas Theater Center, Dallas, Texas (2010).^[8]

Knechtges choreographed the music video for Fatboy Slim's "It's a Wonderful Night. ^[1] In 2008, in Berlin, Germany, he choreographed Der Schuh Das Manitu.^[9]

References [link]

^ ^a ^b ^c "Dan Knechtges biography" wrightwaymasterclasses.com, retrieved April 21, 2010
^ ^a ^b "Talking With Choreographer Dan Knechtges". Playhousesquare.org, retrieved April 21, 2010
^ "Dan Knechtges biography". Playbill.com, retrieved April 21, 2010
^ "Xanadu? Can Do!". The News-Herald, February 28, 2010, accessed April 21, 2010
^ Sondheim on Sondheim. Brian on Broadway, accessed April 21, 2010
^ "'Citizen Ruth' listing". Citizenruth.info, retrieved April 21, 2010
^ Dan Knechtges at BroadwayWorld.com, accessed April 21, 2010
^ "'Give It Up!' listing. Callastheatercenter.org, retrieved April 21, 2010
^ Dan Knechtges at Playbill.com, accessed April 21, 2010

External links [link]

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Name	Knechtges, Dan
Alternative names
Short description
Date of birth
Place of birth
Date of death
Place of death

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[edit] Taking Pinafore to the United States

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