IN-PERSON: The Elderwise classroom at the Vineyard Church
An arranged partnership between England’s foremost composer of classical music and its leading creator of light comic verse might appear to be a recipe for impossible expectations. And, for the first few years of their collaboration, the comic operas produced by William S. Gilbert and Arthur S. Sullivan proved to be a mixed bag of successes and disappointments. Beginning in 1878, however, with the debut of HMS Pinafore (or The Lass That Loved a Sailor), the team of Gilbert and Sullivan became an international sensation, evolving into a cultural institution in Great Britain and in her former colonies around the world. In this presentation, Todd Maslyk invites you to enter the Topsy-Turvy world of Gilbert and Sullivan, to investigate why their work continues to be staged more often than that of any author not named William Shakespeare, and to take a closer look at HMS Pinafore, which will be staged by the University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society (UMGASS) this April. Todd Maslyk is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Germanic Languages and Literatures at the University of Michigan, and the current president of UMGASS. He has been a Gilbert and Sullivan fan since a childhood encounter with The Mikado and is regularly to be found around campus in Ann Arbor pushing people in the direction of the nearest theater.
