Richard Bratby

This is how G&S should be staged: ENO’s HMS Pinafore reviewed

Plus: I’ve rarely heard a Covent Garden crowd explode like they did at Royal Opera's latest Violetta

Take your kids, take your opera-sceptic friends; take your sisters and your cousins and your aunts: Les Dennis as Sir Joseph Porter and Bethan Langford as Hebe in HMS Pinafore. Credit: © Marc Brenner

Until 1881, HMS Pinafore was the second-longest-running show in West End history. Within a year of its première it had broken America too; at one point there were eight competing productions on Broadway alone. The single most wrongheaded notion that still clings to Gilbert and Sullivan’s operas is that they’re somehow low-rent or parochial.

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