A Musical
Book, music, and lyrics by Ian Taylor. With music by Sir Arthur Sullivan.
This delightful small-scale musical tells the story of the famous Gilbert and Sullivan partnership filled with the incredible successes and the divisions that would threaten their collaboration. We see the highs: their meeting, the association with impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte, the mounting achieve-ments in comic opera, but we also see the problems: the divergencies of temperament and conflicting ambitions, Gilbert’s obsession with his “lozenge” story and the trouble it caused, Sullivan’s lavish social life and its disruptive consequences, his ill health, and the famous tragi-comic quarrel over a new carpet for the theatre. All of these episodes and more are covered as musical excerpts from their well-known operas are threaded into this story.
