Trial By Jury

Show Description:

It is one of the supreme frustrations of all operetta lovers that almost all the music from Gilbert and Sullivan’s first collaboration, the 1871 Thespis, is lost. Thus it is their 1875 one-act comic opera Trial by Jury that must serve as the springboard for understanding their musical and dramatic innovations and their domination of the British musical stage for a quarter century. Billed initially as a dramatic cantata and based on a comic ballad that Gilbert had penned in 1868 for Fun magazine, the show won immediate accolades from the press and created a sensation with London’s theater-going public. The farcical plot concerns Angelina’s breach-of-promise-of-marriage suit against Edwin. Between a less-than-unbiased jury and a lecherous judge, the trial’s outcome is, to say the least, unexpected. The timelessness and seemingly perpetual relevance of Gilbert’s words—in all 14 of his collaborations with Sullivan—is no better captured than in the court usher’s opening advice to the jury: “All kinds of vulgar prejudice I pray you set aside.”