Sullivan & Gilbert is currently being staged in Austin.
For fans of Gilbert & Sullivan, you will be thinking I made a mistake by switching the names. For that, you must blame the famed playwright Ken Ludwig, who created this comedic look into the lives of Arthur Sullivan and William Gilbert.
With intermission it is 3 hours, but unlike most lengthy plays I have been less-than-pleased to sit through, this one is a gem. It also marks the 50th anniversary of our very own Gilbert and Sullivan organization, founded in Austin in 1976.
“We were looking around for something to do special and that’s how I came across Ken Ludwig’s Sullivan & Gilbert,” explained Production Coordinator Michael Meigs. “Ludwig wrote it in 1983 before he hit the big time. It’s pretty obscure. According to the Concord Theatricals map, we’re the only one doing it right now.”
In this production, Gilbert is played by Sam Johnson, who first performed with the Austin group in 1996; and Sullivan is played by Holton Johnson, who has appeared in productions of West Side Story, Les Mis, and Deathtrap. Together, they are on stage almost continuously for the entire show, holding the audience in anticipation of their next argument and friendly reunion. A bravura performance by both, worthy of Broadway.
They are supported by a sterling cast including Jeffrey Jones-Ragona as Richard D’Oyly Carte, the guy who stages all the G&S productions. His insufferable role as the mediator between Gilbert & Sullivan is delivered with a refined degree of exasperation. And Lindsay M. Palinsky, as Gilbert’s wife, shares the mediator role with aplomb, a great example of the power of women in Victorian England.
Brenham Sean Adams, portraying the son of Queen Victoria, is suitably foppish. He delivers the Ludwig’s most clearly drawn comedic role in the play with panache. He is shown here with Sarah Manna, who plays a very feisty Violet Russell, a love interest of Sullivan in the play.
G&S AUSTIN AT 50
Since this is the Golden year of the local G&S group, I interviewed Meigs about its history, and the way forward.
“It started out basically as a small group that established a nonprofit in 1976. And they were mostly drawn from the University of Texas: some of the professional faculty there. Dr. Gilman was a mathematics professor, and he was initially the pianist and then later on he conducted a small orchestra as the group developed. In our summer productions now, we call it the Gilman Light Opera Orchestra.
“His wife, who lived into her 90s, was on the board when I first joined in 2010, and his granddaughter is on the board now. So there’s a through line, a tradition.
“Starting in the 90s, one of the board members made contact with Ralph MacPhail Jr.; he’s now our artistic director emeritus and he’s a G&S scholar (link below). He started directing for us on invitation in the 90s and continued until 2019. So we were doing specifically traditional work, staging that was taken directly from Gilbert and Sullivan’s playbooks and all the scholarly work that he had done.
“It was quite successful over the years, particularly with Jeffrey Jones-Ragona (who was in tonight’s production) as our music director. Over the years, those two working together established a really impressive tradition of the Grand Summer musical.
“It was strictly traditional, as close as possible to the originals. Then COVID hit. We had been preparing a Scottish version of the Mikado in response to criticisms of a traditional Mikado. A scholar, Josephine Lee, published a book-length criticism in 2010 of Yellowface opera using the Mikado as an example.
“As the controversy spread, we realised there was going be a problem for our schedule in 2020, so we started working on a revision and we came up with the idea of a Scottish version. COVID shut us down at the first music rehearsal. And we were entirely shut down in 2021.
“In 2022 COVID seemed to be retreating and we tried to put on the Mikado then. We got all the way through the rehearsals, had an opening night, and then fourteen cast members came down with COVID! Total loss. It cost us an entire season. But in 2023 we managed to have a complete run of our Scottish Mikado.
“We now make it available for performance by any non-commercial company. And to date there have been five versions produced in North America and one in in the UK.
“In 2024 we did a traditional performance of Yeoman of the Guard, and in 2025 we moved to McCallum High School and did HMS Pinafore. We are very pleased with the way that turned out, with the new cooperation with that fine arts academy. So that’s got us to our fiftieth year: 2026!
“Fifty years of GNS! We do one grand summer production. It’s always in June to avoid conflict with the Austin Opera schedule. And we have been using school facilities which are available only for that limited summer time frame. Here in Austin, we offer four scholarships a year for people from Austin or surrounding areas who are pursuing careers in vocal performance.”
FUTURE PROSPECTS
I asked Meigs about the changing understanding of GNS over the decades.
“That’s one of our major preoccupations in that our audience tends to skew older because older people are familiar with Gilbert & Sullivan. Gilbert & Sullivan is in essence a long form of art. It’s not for people with very short attention spans.”
After COVID, the audience numbers for G&S in Austin fell. “Gilbert & Sullivan is less obviously evident in the culture today. In Texas, there’s a Houston Gilbert & Sullivan Society; they put on a single summer production that runs two weekends. G&S, although they’re embedded in the culture, for anyone who has been born since 1985 is not obvious.”
Meigs explained what is happening for the next 2 years.
“We staged Princess Ida in 2013, and it was fine. But in the culture since that time, the status of women and the Roe v Wade decision by the Supreme Court, Princess Ida is not quite as fun as it was when it was staged in the 1890s. So, we decided that just as we worked with the Mikado to adjust it to contemporary values, we’re going to push off Princess Ida to 2028 in order to look at it more closely, figure out how we can make it more relevant to our contemporary culture. Instead, this coming summer, 2027, we’ll be doing the Pirates of Penzance, which is certainly non-controversial, is popular, and we hope that it will be an audience builder!”
For more on Ralph MacPhail:
background reading:
The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, by Josephine Lee. University of Minnesota Press (2010).
The last performance of the current run of Sullivan & Gilbert is tonite, Oct. 18. Go to the website for tickets of this marvellous production:
Directed by Emily Taylor. Music Director for this performance: Dr. Ellie Jarrett Shattles
Photos by Steve Rogers
Lead photo: Sam Johnson (r) comically massages the feet of Holton Johnson.
second photo: Palinsky mediates an argument between the two
third photo: Adams and Manna