A ruling cabal of dim, sexist, and privileged dudes vs. a bright, talented woman. Could be talking about today’s millionaire-club Congress, or the misadventures of our corrupt Supreme Court. It is, alas, a perennial story. 

It’s also the story told humorously, satirically and musically by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan in their operetta Iolanthe. Light Opera of Portland (LOoP) brings it to downtown Portland’s Brunish Theatre June 28-30, then to Hillsboro Artists Regional Theatre July 19-August 4. This summer’s production also signals a new chapter in the 12-year-old company’s ongoing saga of bringing those hardy G&S perennials to Oregon audiences. 

Universal Humor

Why have Iolanthe and Gilbert & Sullivan’s other finest shows remained popular a century and a half after most of their contemporary entertainments have faded? 

“The biggest thing that helps is Gilbert’s sense of the absurd,” says LOoP artistic director Laurence Cox. “It’s more than just political satire. A lot of satirical stuff is funny at the time it’s written, but look back a few years later, and it doesn’t age as well. Gilbert takes a lot of stuff people see in the real world, turns it on its head, amps it up so it’s utterly ridiculous — but the characters act as though everything’s normal and to be expected. It’s the dropping people into extraordinary situations and not having them react as you’d expect them to react that must be universal, because it translates so well. The combination of a situation being so absurd, and everyone treating it normally, transcends cultures and eras. That sense of humor that Gilbert brought, combined with Sullivan’s beautiful music, is what has made their popularity endure all these years. They are the great survivors.”

If that formula sounds familiar, it’s because you’ve seen it in the satirical comedies of G&S’s contemporary Oscar Wilde and down through subsequent eras of British comedy from Spike Milligan, Peter Sellers and the Goon Show through Peter Cook and Dudley Moore and their direct successors in Monty Python’s Flying Circus. “I could see the members of the House of Lords in Iolanthe being included in [Python sketch] ‘Upper Class Twit of the Year,’”  Cox says. 

That timeless appeal should also reassure anyone worried that the veddy British references might soar over the heads of American theatergoers unfamiliar with the political intricacies of Victorian England — just as most Americans’ lack of familiarity with British culture didn’t stop us from religiously tuning into Python TV series reruns, movies, and spinoffs like Spamalot (in which Cox has played King Arthur) for decades. Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic creations were popular in America during their lifetimes and have remained staples on stage and screen around the world ever since, profoundly influencing the course of musical theater. And in a moment when a wealthy elite ruling class seems hellbent on destroying democracy and even its own civilization in the pursuit of its own extreme wealth, absurdity seems a rational artistic response to contemporary conditions.

“These shows are being performed all over the world — Europe, Asia, America, the UK,” Cox says. “If people everywhere weren’t relating to the humor of them, and Sullivan’s amazing music, they wouldn’t have remained so popular.”

The key to pulling off absurdist humor of this sort is for the actors to play it absolutely straight, acting as though this increasingly insane stage world is utterly normal. “If everyone on stage in those moments was giving a nod and a wink, the impact dissipates immediately,” Cox explains.  

Cox himself is a master of that approach. I still chuckle at his performance as the Rt. Hon. Sir Joseph Porter, K.C.B., First Lord of the Admiralty, in last season’s H.M.S. Pinafore. The audience howled each time he wordlessly glanced out at them, thoroughly deadpan, as he danced — quite trippingly, it must be noted — his way around the HART Theatre stage in an extended (nine-minute) dance sequence that gets sillier with each turn. His precise diction, vocal clarity and breath control in the famous high-velocity G&S patter songs are equally impressive. 

LOoPing In

Paradoxically, perhaps, it was actually G&S’s historical, rather than universal, qualities that first drew the British-born Cox to Gilbert & Sullivan. While studying theater and history at university in Wales, he’d mostly performed in Golden Age American musicals. But when a local community theater group announced a performance of Pirates, Cox decided to “see what this older style of musical theater was all about,” he recalls. 

After that performance as Samuel, the Pirate King’s right-hand man, Cox was hooked, and has gone on to perform in many G&S productions. He now lacks only three to complete a full run of the 14 comic operettas the revered team wrote between 1871 and 1896. 

Cox carried his G&S infatuation across the pond after sailing — well, flying — the ocean blue to the American homeland of his new wife. (They and their three children live in Hillsboro.) He  directed and performed in G&S shows in various American cities, along with other theatrical performances in Oregon.

It was backstage after performing in a comedy in Beaverton that Cox met Dennis Britten, who’d recently returned to Oregon after a career teaching theater and performing with Gilbert & Sullivan companies across the country. Connecting over their shared obsession, in 2012, he joined when Britten founded the Dairyville Players, which performed abridged versions of G&S classics at the (late, lamented) Alpenrose Opera House.

Britten expanded the company in 2014, bringing in Oregon Chorale Artistic Director Bernie Kuehn as music director, and some of the choristers to sing in full productions, beginning with 2015’s Ruddigore. Rebranding as Light Opera of Portland, the company continued its growth — until the Covid pandemic brought everything to a halt. During the long interregnum, Britten decided to retire, and Cox stepped up to succeed him as artistic director. 

“It gave me a chance to dive headfirst into the world of Gilbert & Sullivan, and became a life passion of mine,” Cox says. “It’s been wonderful to be able to bring these stories to the stage and find that their humor speaks to people everywhere.”

Cox also performed with Portland’s previous Gilbert & Sullivan theater company, Mocks Crest, at the University of Portland. It, too, shut down during the pandemic while preparing a scuttled 2020 production of H.M.S. Pinafore. 

“The last time I spoke to the faculty member who had taken it over in 2019,” Cox wrote in an email, “they said that there were no plans to continue with it. In fact, they have subsequently donated their G&S script and score library and many of their G&S costumes to Light Opera of Portland, and several former performers have joined our company, and our board, in an effort to ensure that LOoP is able to continue their legacy of consistent, high quality G&S productions within the greater Portland area.”

LOoP commenced its post-Covid comeback with a small-scale Pinafore at Milwaukie’s Chapel Theater. Then last year, Cox, who had performed in several Hillsboro Artists Regional Theatre productions, met new HART Artistic Director Harrison Butler, who invited LOoP to remount the full Pinafore (whose original run had been cut short by Covid) last summer. It sold out the entire run, bringing new audiences to both the company and the theater. Cox hopes to regularly bring LOoP shows to Washington County audiences at HART.

Cox’s expansive ambitions for LOoP also include turning it into a Gilbert & Sullivan repertory company, with a corps of regular players who have abundant experience in the peculiarities of G&S performance practice, and a storehouse of costumes, props and music for various productions. That will allow the company to take its various shows all over the Portland region whenever the opportunity arises. 

Love vs. Power

LOoP’s expansion takes another step forward with this summer’s production of Iolanthe. The company’s twelfth production (most by Gilbert & Sullivan) marks another company breakthrough: LOoP’s downtown debut at Portland5’s Brunish Theater this weekend, with HART performances to follow later this summer.

While one of the most admired of their collaborations among G&S connoisseurs, the 1882 comic opera, written midway between the ever-popular Pirates and The Mikado, isn’t as well-known to general audiences. Nevertheless, it boasts perennial Gilbertisms — send-ups of the foibles of elite political classes, magic spells, comic misunderstandings — and “absolutely beautiful music, some of Sullivan’s best,” Cox says. Listeners might hear echoes of Wagner’s leitmotivs, Mendelssohn’s midsummer night’s fairy music, and “truly majestic moments.” 

With Cox directing and playing the Lord Chancellor, LOoP will perform it with a small-scale, eight-piece ensemble with strings, woodwinds, prominent brass, chorus and vocal soloists. The design uses historically appropriate costumery and props of the era.

The story pits selfish aristocrats and venal politicians against magical creatures, including the titular fairy, who has committed a heinous crime: marrying a mortal. The action opens years later, with her resulting half-mortal son, a shepherd, falling in love with a noble young woman far above his social station — who’s also coveted by the upper class twits who have the power to foil their romance. Will true love triumph over entitled wealthy male privilege and narrow-minded social strictures? 

Whoops, that makes Iolanthe sound way more serious and less deliciously silly than it really is. This being the jolly fantasy of Gilbert & Sullivan, rather than the Real World, rest assured that a happy future lies ahead for all concerned — as seems likely for Light Opera of Portland. 

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Light Opera of Portland’s production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Iolanthe opens June 28-30 at Brunish Theatre, 1111 SW Broadway, Portland, and continues July 19-21, 26-28, and August 2-4 at HART, 185 S.E. Washington St., Hillsboro, a few steps from the Max Blue Line stop. Tickets and info.