Long-Term Collaboration

The English composer Frederic Clay (1838-1889) is responsible for first introducing Gilbert and Sullivan. Gilbert had written the libretto for Clay’s comic operetta Ages Ago (1869), so he was familiar with his style of writing stories and characters for the theater. Clay was a friend of Sullivan and introduced Sullivan to Gilbert in 1870. However, it was not until 1871 when the theater producer John Hollingshead (1827-1904) brought the two men together to create an operetta in time for the Christmas season. The resulting collaboration was Thespis, or The Gods Grown Old (1871), a critical and popular success. Over the next twenty-five years, Gilbert and Sullivan collaborated on thirteen more comic operas.

George (1898-1937) and Ira (1896-1983) Gershwin: 13 years active; 12 stage musicals

Lady Be Good (1924)
Funny Face (1927)
Strike Up the Band (1927)
Girl Crazy (1930)
Porgy and Bess (1935)

Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart (1895-1943): 24 years active; 28 stage musicals

The Girl Friend (1926)
A Connecticut Yankee (1927)
Present Arms (1928)
Babes in Arms (1937)

Alan Jay Lerner (1918-1986) and Frederick Loewe (1901-1988): 20 years active; 8 stage musicals

Brigadoon (1947)
Paint Your Wagon (1951)
My Fair Lady (1956)
Camelot (1960)

These composers, lyricists, and librettists “learned to build on each other’s strengths” throughout their time together, and like Gilbert and Sullivan, they experienced critical and popular success.

A Cohesive Whole

From as early as the sixteenth century, the success of many operas relied on the involvement of well-known singers to carry the show, eventually giving rise to the diva (literally, goddess). These operatic stars attracted large audiences with their virtuosity, and in turn, these audiences brought with them money. As a result, a diva’s ability to attract audiences directly affected the amount of power they could wield over producers, composers, and librettists. It was not uncommon for these singers to exploit this power by inserting themselves into the creative process, sometimes at the expense of the opera’s coherency. If there was a particular aria or song that the singer liked, even if it was completely unrelated to the plot, they could choose to include it as part of the production. This power of the performer over production continued well into the nineteenth century in opera and even musical theater; however, the rise of operetta culture began to make star performers irrelevant.[4]

While some scholars attribute Rodgers and Hammerstein with transforming musical theater from a “star medium to a writer’s medium,” Gilbert and Sullivan were already making the transition decades earlier.[5] As early reviews show, Gilbert’s witty and satirical texts paired with Sullivans’s music won over audiences, not the performers themselves. Consider the following excerpts from a review of The Pirates of Penzance’s New York premiere,

Despite considerable inadequacies from one of the principal players, Sullivan’s text and Gilbert’s music were enough to compensate for the less than stellar performances. Subsequent tours and revivals of Gilbert and Sullivan’s operettas attest that it was not the performers responsible for the show’s success but the cohesiveness of the libretto and music.

Andrew Bruegge notes that by the mid-twentieth century, creative teams were engaged in doing the same work Gilbert and Sullivan did several decades earlier, essentially reinventing the wheel by consciously creating “integrated shows that transcended the need for specific star performers to give them life on stage.”[7] This work, which Bruegge calls “the most historically significant artistic legacy that Gilbert and Sullivan might have offered to the American musical theatre,” has become standard practice among current composers, librettists, and lyricists.[8]

“Middlebrow Appeal”

Another element of the Savoy system developed by Gilbert and Sullivan is the unabashed and deliberate appeal to middle-class audiences. Returning to the opening night of Pirates, we can get a sense of what this “middlebrow” appeal meant to those in attendance. One reviewer noted the following:

It may be that the author of the book and the composer of the music were alike influenced by a desire to do nothing that their admirers had not been accustomed to in their former works. It is certain that there is very little, if anything, in the music that Mr. Sullivan has not said before. That it is pleasing, because tuneful and melodious, will be accepted as conclusive. There is better evidence of tune-making than the desire to exhibit musical science or original invention. […] The melodies of the songs and pieces, in the first act especially, fall familiarly upon the ear.[9]

The reviewer points out that Gilbert and Sullivan were desirous to “do nothing that their admirers had not been accustomed to in their former works,” which tells us that they were conscious of their previous success, particularly H.M.S. Pinafore and knew what their audiences wanted – memorable tunes, clever dialogue, and humor. The American author, theater director, and critic John Bush Jones asserted that “Gilbert and Sullivan showed America that it was possible to combine three elements successfully ― integrated script, score, and production elements; soft-pedaled social satire; and crowd-pleasing entertainment.”[10] At the time Gilbert and Sullivan were writing their operettas, the characteristics of satire along with integrated story elements were generally associated with opera and other entertainments of the upper classes, while elements of “bourgeois morality and rousing song-and-dance” were considered more closely related to the burlesques, reviews, and minstrelsy shows common among the lower classes.[11] Operetta, and later, twentieth-century musical theater, combined these elements, resulting in broad middle-class appeal. This appeal continues to the present time, evidenced by cultural phenomena like Hamilton (2015).

Looking back on the various operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan, we can see a clear formula used by the duo that contributed to their success. “If any of us wanted to mount a successful musical on Broadway tomorrow,” suggests Andrew Bruegge, “we’d have the statistics on our side if we used this Savoy system.”[12] Although statistics do not equal a secret for success, the following steps will start anyone who wants to write an award-winning musical off on the right foot:

1. Partner up with a team of artists to create an integrated show.
2. Develop the book first and create music and lyrics to suit.
3. Appeal to middle-class audiences with harmless social satire.
4. Employ the best talent and a full staff of professionals to create a highly polished product.
5. Manage that talent with a solid administrative vision.
6. Implement retail theater practices.

Good luck!

---

[1] Andrew Vorder Bruegge, “A Dull Enigma: Historians’ Analysis of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Impact on the Development of the American Musical Theater,” from the SelectedWorks of Andrew Vorder Bruegge, Ph.D. (Winthrop University: 2021), http://works.bepress.com/andrew_vorder_bruegge/18/.

[2] Bruegge, 1-2.

[3] Emphasis is original. Bruegge, 9. See also Bernard Rosenberg and Ernest Harburg, The Broadway Musical: Collaboration in Commerce and Art (New York University Press: NY, 1993), 12.

[4] Bruegge, 9.

[5] Bruegge, 9.

[6] Review, The New York Tribune, 1 January 1880.

[7] Bruegge, 9.

[8] Bruegge, 12.

[9] Review: “Opera Comique,” The Morning Post, 5 April 1880.

[10] Bruegge, 10. See also John Bush Jones, Our Musicals, Ourselves: A Social History of the American Musical Theatre (Brandeis University Press: NH, 2003), 11-10.

[11] Bruegge, 10.

[12] Bruegge, 13.