With this outrageously funny masterpiece, Boheme Opera New Jersey enters the world of Gilbert and Sullivan for the very first time. With the company’s reputation for even casts and imaginative staging, Boheme is excited to be working with Broadway casting veteran Jamibeth Margolis as she continues to build her directorial career.  She and Artistic Director Joseph Pucciatti have assembled a fabulous group of Gilbert and Sullivan characters sure to entertain audiences from the very first note.

Patriots Theater at The War Memorial
1 Memorial Drive, Trenton, NJ  08608
Directly off Route 29 at Memorial Drive In the heart of the Capital District

Saturday – April 17, 2010 – 7:30 P.M.
Sunday – April 18. 2010 – 3:00 P.M.

Complimentary Pre-curtain Talks in the theater one hour and fifteen minutes prior to each performance.

Plentiful free and secure parking.

Boheme Box Office:  (609) 581-7200

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BACKGROUND: THE ORIGIN OF THE SAVOY TRADITION
The rage for Offenbach in London can be traced back to the season of his one-act operettas at the St. James's Theatre in 1857, presented by the Bouffes-Parisiens Company under the auspices of the composer.  A few English-language Offenbach adaptations followed in the early 1860's.  In 1865 Orphee aux Enfers played with some success as the endearingly titled Orpheus in the Haymarket.  Bluebeard Repaired appeared at the Olympic in June 1866 and that same month saw Helen, or Taken from the Greek at the Adelphi Theatre.  La Grande-Duchesse de Gerolstein came over, in English, to the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, in November 1867.

Hortense Schneider, an actress who appeared for three summer seasons in a row (1868-1870), recreated her famous Paris parts and especially delighted fashionable audiences who could say they had already seen her as the Grand Duchess during the Paris Exhibition of 1867.  Yet many critics and playgoers complained of her suggestive gestures and extremely risque situations in these French importations.  Some librettists attempted to clean up some of the double entrendres when these words were anglicized, but breeched parts and scanty attire lured other patrons to certain London theatres which were becoming well known for operetta by the 1870's.

A notable London operetta theatre was the Gaiety, managed by John Hollingshead and famous specifically for burlesque, but later for continental comic opera.  Burlesque in the British sense meant a travesty of some popular or familiar work, often a grand opera, a play, or a fairy tale and usually with songs interpolated from other operas or operettas.  Certain elements of the extravaganza and the pantomime were utilized:  "the principal boy" played by a girl, the low comedian, and the shower of puns.  Hollingshead opened his new theatre with the then-customary triple bill on December 21, 1868 that included Robert the Devil, or The Nun, the Dun and the Son of a Gun, a burlesque of Meyerbeer's Robert le Diable.  It had new words set to Meyerbeer melodies, but it also had tunes by Herold, Bellini, Herve, and Offenbach.  The author had already travestied Donizetti's L'Elisir d'Amore and La Fille du Regiment; he later ws to take on Balfe's Bohemian Girl and Bellini's Norma.  His name: William Schwenck Gilbert (1836 - 1911).

The Gaiety Theatre had no real rival for burlesque, but other theatres becoma famous for their operetta performances:  the Olympic, the Philharmonic, the Islington, the Alhambra, and others.  All this activity and the irresistible Offenbach and other melodies readied the London public for the Gilbert and Sullivan revolution of the late 1870's.

A sizable segment of the mid-Victorian population, however, would not set foot inside a theatre.  Plays - and players - were considered so immoral that it became necessary to disquise them as other forms, not of entertainment, but of education.  Plays were "illustrations," acts were "parts," and the actors' roles were "assumptions."  The musical world, steeped in the gloomy, didactic churchiness of this period, supplied oratorios and cantatas by the dozens, based on religious or similarly pious subjects to satisfy the public's real craving for opera and other musical-stage works.  Arthur Seymour Sullivan (1842-1900) became very famous as a result of his compositions in this mode.  A great segment of the middle class preferred to see anything in any way instructive:  dioramas, panoramas, scientific lectures with magic-lantern slides.  Minstrel shows were also considered innocent and proper.  The music hall, which saw its real beginnings at this time, was not yet considered the middle-class popular entertainment it became by the 1890's; in the 1860's it had a distinctly lower-class patronage. 

The German Reed Gallery of Illustration "entertainments" were part of the foundation of Gilbert and Sullivan and the national school of British operetta.  These "illustruations' were held in a hall resembling a drawing room more than a theatre, with a piano, a harmonium, and sometimes a harp as the orchestra.  Librettis F. C. Burnand described the proceedings as if "you were attending a meeting...and that the attendants were somehow not very distantly related to pew-openers, or might even have been pew-openers themselves only slightly disguised."  Besides various piano entertainments and solo and other comedy sketches (a sort of Victorian equivalent of nightclub acts), one-act comic operettas and farces were offered.  The operettas were clearly modeled on the one-act operas-bouffes of Offenbach, but without any Parisian vulgarities, in order to appeal to their middle-class audience.  Domestic comedies, exotic vignettes, and typical farce plots involving mistaken identities provided the stories.  The music was simple and tuneful, and obviously not intended for a full orchestra.  In 1867, German Reed leased the larger St. George's Hall, engaged a large chorus and orchestra, and undertook a season of "English" opera.  Though not a financial success, this season was a courageous milestone in the history of English operetta.

Of the various librettists and composers working for the Reeds, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivna, separately, were the most famous.  It was through a German Reed piece, Ages Ago, that its librettist, Gilbert, first met Sullivan in 1869., through the agency of its composer, Frederic Clay. Later, John Hollingshead, having convinced the duo to work together, produced the first Gilbert and Sullivan collaboration on Boxing Day, December 26, 1871 at his Gaiety Theatre, entitled Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old.  Although it was found to be underrehearsed by the critics, they admired much of the music and the libretto of this "grotesque opera," and even saw a future for the collaborators together.

That golden future would not have been realized were it not for Richard D'Oyly Carte, in 1875 a thirty-one-year old concert and lecture agent who was then managing the Royalty Theatre.  Offenbach's La Perichole was the attraction, as usual supported by various one-act pieces for which Carte was always on the lookout.  Gilbert had recently adapted a one-page "operetta" from Fun into a libretto for the Carl Rosa Opera Company when Mme. Rosa died.  Meeting Gilbert and informing him of his need for a short operetta, preferably British, Carte was told about Trial by Jury.  Carte immediately suggested Sullivan as the composer.  Gilbert and Sullivan met a few days later, and within weeks it was written, rehearsed and ready.  The tremendously enthusiastic first night took place on March 25, 1875.  The reviews were ecstatic. In fact, critics complained that it was too short!  The Times:  "It seems, as in the great Wagnerian operas, as though poem and music had proceeded simultaneously from one and the same brain."

Many critics consider Trial by Jury one of the best Gilbert and Sullivna works, and in some ways it is unsurpassed - a delectable hors-d'oeuvre filled with everything they would do in the later works, but fresh and original here.  Although it is technically a real opera buffa, with recitatives, arias, ensembles, and no dialogue (Gilbert called it a "dramatic cantata"), its musical model and the satiric frollery of the libretto are pure operetta.

Commenting on the usual operetta productions of the early 1870's, Gilbert's 1906 description of his collaboration with Sullivan demonstrates the mission to which they adhered:

"When Sullivan and I began to collaborate, English comic opera had practically ceased to exist. Such musical entertainments as held the stage were adaptations of the crapulous plots of the operas of Offenbach, Audran and Lecocq.  The plots had generally been bowdlerized out of intelligibility, and when they had not been subjected to this treatment they were frankly improper; whereas the ladies' dresses suggested that the management had gone on the principle of doing a little and doing it well.  We set out with the determination to prove that these elements were not essential to the success of humorous opera.  We resolved that our plots, however ridiculous, should be coherent, that our dialogue should be void of offence; on artistic principles, no man should play a woman's part and no woman a man's. Finally, we agreed that no lady of the company should be required to wear a dress that she could not wear with absolute propriety at a private fancy ball; and I believe I may say that we proced our case."

Gilbert and Sullivan's output was later dubbed the "Savoy Operas," since all but the first six of the fourteen they created were first performed at London's Savoy Theatre (capacity 1,122), built by Richard D'Oyly Carte and for a long time the London base of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company.  The Savoy was built for the express purpose of presenting the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas.  On October 10, 1881, Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience (which had a long run at the Opera Comique) inaugurated the brand-new Savoy Theatre.  Enlarged and brightened settings were required for the larger stage and the electricity, used for the first time to illuminate a London theatre.  Actually, the stage itself was not electrified on opening night - the power of the generator was sufficient only for the auditorium lighting.  However, the first-nighters for the next operetta, Iolanthe, saw a fully electric show, complete with battery-powered stars in the fairies' hair.

It is interesting to recall the broad popular appeal of Gilbert and Sullivan, who truly entertained high, low and middlebrow in the late nineteenth century, and who were so popular as to drive French operetta almost completely off the English-speaking stage. Not only because their scores were tuneful, or because the libretti were amusing, or because of that remarkable oil-vinegar suspension that kept the two forces together so magnificently.  Much of their great popularity was due to the intelligence of the operettas, musically and literarily. They were "funny without being vulgar," a perfection that was attributable to a great extent to Gilbert.  In terms of advertising, Sullivan's melodies probably have more to do with the operettas remaining so popular after all these years.  A great deal of the intelligence of the operettas was originally due to stagecraft - the superb productions directed by Gilbert and so tastefully mounted by D'Oyly Carte.  They were simply the best musical productions of the Victorian age.

                                                            Taken from Richard Traubner's Operetta - A Theatrical History