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20 unusual facts about Gilbert and Sullivan


1870s in music

This was an important period of transition in English music as it went from the focus on rotating pieces in performance to the era of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta.

Alice B. Woodward

This project was followed by the stories of two Gilbert and Sullivan operas and even more children's books all with coloured illustrations.

Alston Rivers

The firm originally consisted of the Hon L.J. Bathurst and R.B. Byles and had brought out the novels of Whyte Melville and the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

Ann George

She was born in Smethwick, and entered show business as a singer appearing in musicals such as The Belle of New York and The Desert Song and featured in the Gilbert and Sullivan show D'Oyly Carte.

Baby farming

The Gilbert and Sullivan opera H.M.S. Pinafore, the character of Buttercup reveals that, when a baby farmer, she had switched two babies of different social classes.

Blanche Whiffen

In 1879 she played Buttercup in the first American production of Gilbert and Sullivan's Pinafore.

Bob Roseveare

He was keen on the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, and on the history of the Rosevear (also spelled Roseveare or Rosevere) family from Cornwall, England, starting about AD 1500 in the hamlet of Rescorla near Luxulyan.

Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act 1907

The lengthy nature of the campaign was referred to in the Gilbert and Sullivan opera Iolanthe, in which the Queen of the Fairies sings "He shall prick that annual blister, marriage with deceased wife's sister".

Doctor Who and the Pirates

#The various songs use substituted lyrics in tunes from various Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.

Hollywood Pinafore

Hollywood Pinafore, or The Lad Who Loved a Salary is a musical comedy in two acts by George S. Kaufman, with music by Arthur Sullivan, based on Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore.

Irving Kaplansky

After moving to the University of Chicago, he stopped playing for two decades, but then returned to music as an accompanist for student-run Gilbert and Sullivan productions and as a calliope player in football game parades.

Leonora Braham

After returning to England, she was engaged by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, creating five of the principal soprano roles in the hit series of Gilbert and Sullivan operas, including the title role in Patience (1881), Phyllis in Iolanthe (1882), the title role in Princess Ida (1884), Yum-Yum in The Mikado (1885), and Rose Maybud in Ruddigore (1887).

Leonora Braham (3 February 1853 – 23 November 1931), born Leonora Lucy Abraham, was an English opera singer and actress primarily known as the creator of principal soprano roles in the Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas.

Louise Kirkby Lunn

She was particularly active in the 1900–1901 Queen's Hall season with Wood, appearing with Blauvelt, Lloyd Chandos and Daniel Price, and the Wolverhampton Festival Choral Society, in Beethoven's last symphony on 16 March, and in Gilbert and Sullivan excerpts (with Lloyd Chandos and Florence Schmidt).

Mabel Hite

Elsie Hite, originally from Illinois, would accompany her daughter throughout her early career which began at about age eleven in amateur theater as 'The Lord Chancellor' in Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, Iolanthe.

Music of Prince Edward Island

By the end of the century, Charlottetown had its own opera house, performing comic operas by Gilbert and Sullivan.

Our Lady of Salvation High School

However, Our Lady of Salvation School, located in a lower middle income area where the idea of an opera was alien to many has produced Gilbert and Sullivan operas year after year.

Rick Besoyan

Upon his return, Besoyan joined the Bredon-Savoy Light Opera Company, where he performed the role of Ko-Ko in Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

Sam Seaborn

"Princeton" is his Secret Service code name, and he mentions being the recording secretary of the Princeton Gilbert and Sullivan Society.

The Phantom President

During the filming, Cohan would sarcastically refer to Rodgers and Hart as "Gilbert and Sullivan".


All Saints Notting Hill

Walter Passmore (1867–1946), the singer and actor best known for his comic baritone roles in Gilbert and Sullivan operas with the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company, was a choirboy at All Saints.

At sixes and sevens

The phrase is also used in Gilbert & Sullivan's operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (1878), where the captain, confused as to what choices to make in his life, exclaims in the opening song of Act II, "Fair moon, to thee I sing, bright regent of the heavens, say, why is everything either at sixes or at sevens?"

Burr McIntosh

His sister Nancy McIntosh, an operatic soprano, was the protege, adopted daughter and heiress to the estate and royalties of W. S. Gilbert of Gilbert and Sullivan.

Daphnephoria

Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience, a comic opera about the Aesthetic Movement which references Frederic Leighton's painting of the festival.

Digby Bell

Bell studied in Europe to become a concert singer, and became famous for his roles in comic musical productions, such as Gilbert and Sullivan comic operas and with the McCaull Comic Opera Company.

Ellis Weiner

His first produced work was the 1967 Pikesville High Junior Play, an original parody using music from H.M.S. Pinafore and other Gilbert and Sullivan operas.

Gwynyth Walsh

Her first appearance on screen was in a 1984 TV movie of Gilbert and Sullivan's Iolanthe.

Ian Belsey

Belsey has appeared in opera and the works of Gilbert and Sullivan at major theatres and concert halls throughout the United Kingdom and in France, Germany, Holland, Spain, New York, Bermuda, the Far East and aboard the QE2 on the World Cruise.

John B. Mason

He later appeared in every original Gilbert and Sullivan opera production in America and created the leading roles in the plays Hands Across the Sea, The English Rose and as Kerchival West in Bronson Howard's Civil War play, Shenandoah.

John Barnett

Although The Mountain Sylph is all but forgotten, it inspired parts of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1882 Savoy Opera, Iolanthe.

Jonathan Biggins

Stage appearances include The Importance of Being Earnest (in which he appeared as "John Worthing", inheriting the role from Geoffrey Rush) — also appearing in A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum, Orpheus in the Underworld, and the Gilbert and Sullivan Savoy operas Ruddigore and The Mikado .

Lamplighters Music Theatre

Founded in 1952 by Orva Hoskinson and Ann Pool MacNab, the Lamplighters specialize in light opera, particularly the works of Gilbert and Sullivan, as well as such works as The Merry Widow, Die Fledermaus, Of Thee I Sing, My Fair Lady, Candide, and A Little Night Music.

Leap year

In Gilbert and Sullivan's 1879 comic opera The Pirates of Penzance, Frederic the pirate apprentice discovers that he is bound to serve the pirates until his 21st birthday rather than until his 21st year.

Marie Doro

Her career was now definitely on the rise, for in 1912 she joined Nat C. Goodwin, Lyn Harding and Constance Collier in a dramatization of Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist, one of the earliest productions of that work, as well as appearing with De Wolf Hopper in an all-star production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Patience.

North Toronto Players

H.M.S. Starship Pinafore: The Next Generation is a Star Trek adaptation of two famous Gilbert and Sullivan operettas (HMS Pinafore and Trial by Jury).

The Fifteen Decisive Battles of the World

Referring to Creasy's work in the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta The Pirates of Penzance, Major-General Stanley boasts that he is able to "quote the fights historical; from Marathon to Waterloo, in order categorical."

The Yorkshire Musical Saw Player

As well as taking part in the "BBC music live" festival he has also played in a skip outside Belfast City Hall for a "Catalyst Arts" Festival, in a folk festival at Broadstairs and as part of the International Gilbert and Sullivan festival in Buxton.

Woolson Morse

According to The New York Times, "Trained in musical composition in Germany, he was one of the first wholly capable American comic-opera composers. Morse's talent so impressed W. S. Gilbert that he asked the American composer to become his collaborator after the 1890 split between Gilbert and Sullivan. Morse refused, however, and continued to compose pieces for New York production... with the aid of harmonium, at which he always wrote his music".

Yeomen of the Guard

Gilbert and Sullivan's operetta, The Yeomen of the Guard (1888), is set in the 16th century, an earlier era before the two corps were split apart; it concerns what are today the Yeomen Warders.