Above: Photos from The Pirates of Penzance - July 2012

Iolanthe - The 51st annual summer production!

The Madison Savoyards first production in 1963 was Iolanthe so it is fitting that the second fifty years of Gilbert & Sullivan in Madison also  begins with Iolanthe in 2013. All performances will be in Music Hall on the UW-Madison campus (on Park Street near State at the foot of Bascom Hill) There will be seven performances:

Friday July 19 and Saturday, July 20 at 7:30 pm

Sunday July 21 at 3:00 pm

Thursday July 25, Friday July 26, and Saturday July 27 at 7:30 pm

Sunday July 28 at 3:00 pm 

Tickets are on sale at this link....  Pre-performance dinners are planned on Friday July 19 and 26.

Iolanthe was last performed by the Madison Savoyards in 2001 and previously in 1988, 1979, 1971 and 1963.

The Gilbert & Sullivan archive says about Iolanthe:
 

Iolanthe, or "The Peer and the Peri", opened at the Savoy Theatre on November 25, 1882, three nights after the final performance of Patience at the same theatre, and ran for 398 performances.

Gilbert had taken pot shots at the aristocracy before, but in this "fairy opera," the House of Lords is lampooned as a bastion of the ineffective, privileged and dim-witted. The political party system and other institutions also come in for a dose of satire. Yet, both author and composer managed to couch the criticism among such bouncy, amiable absurdities that it is all received as good fun.

Both Gilbert and Sullivan were at the height of their creative powers in 1882, and many people feel that Iolanthe, their seventh work together, is the most perfect of their collaborations.