The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan

The Complete Annotated Gilbert & Sullivan provides the complete text of all the Gilbert & Sullivan operas which are still performed today, together with extensive annotations covering 'lost' songs, alterations and additions, obscure allusions, production points, and comments of interest. Each opera has an introduction which places it in its context, and a potted history of performances up to the present. No other book provides such extensive commentary on the texts of the Savoy Opera nor such a source of innocent merriment to fans of the incomparable Victorian duo.

For each opera, there is a short introduction describing how the work came to be written, and giving its performance history. The text, including stage directions, is given on the right-hand page, and on the left (keyed in by line numbers) are notes. These give such information as the identity of a real-life person appearing or mentioned as a character, wordings that were different in the original edition (the one sent to the Lord Chamberlain for licensing), changes made for the first American performance, glosses on technical terms (e.g. legal terms), literary references, cross-references to similar items in other Savoy operas, comments from first-night critics, and many other things