Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Pirates Approaching!


OMG. I cannot believe how busy busy busy it's been around here! Ak! We lost both of our regular staff members in September, and while Carolyn (our Marketing Associate) has stepped in to help with the office stuff, it's still CRAZY.

Ok - I'm going to start with daily posts between now and Pirates, to get you ALL the scoop and some little known tidbits. Starting with:

Did you know….

After the sensational success of H.M.S. Pinafore, many American performing companies presented unauthorized versions of that opera. Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte decided to prevent that from happening again by presenting official versions of their next opera, The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty simultaneously in England and America. The opera premiered on December 31, 1879 at the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York with Sullivan conducting. To secure British copyright, there was a perfunctory performance the afternoon before the New York premiere, at the Royal Bijou Theatre Paignton, Devon, organised by Helen Lenoir (who would later marry Richard D'Oyly Carte). The cast, having performed Pinafore the night before, read from scripts carried onto the stage, making do with whatever costumes they had on hand.

Finally, the opera opened on April 3, 1880, at the Opéra Comique in London, where it ran for 363 performances, having already been playing successfully for over three months in New York.

Information gleaned from The Gilbert & Sullivan Archive and Wikipedia

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