Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers, English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire, London EC2 | until 21 May, then touring ⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review by Clare Colvin

Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith

Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Gondoliers

English Touring Opera, Hackney Empire, London EC2 | until 21 May, then touring

⭐⭐⭐⭐ Review by Clare Colvin

“Gilbert and Sullivan with a Tarantella touch.”

Gilbert and Sullivan’s final great success The Gondoliers, now touring in ETO’s spring 2026 season, certainly has one of the wackiest of WS Gilbert’s comic opera plots.  Director and choreographer Liam Steel, set designer Michael Pavelka, and costume designer Laura Jane Stanfield have created a gorgeously over the top entertainment blending Gilbert’s political satire with Sir Arthur Sullivan’s sunny Italian-influenced score.  The scene is Venice, and a group of cheerful maidens (Contadine) bearing rose-decorated arches, eagerly serenade a pair of gondoliers (Robin Bailey’s Marco and Samuel Pantcheff’s Guiseppe).

One of the gondoliers is said to be heir to the recently deceased King of Barataria, whose baby son was abducted to Venice by Matthew Siveter’s evil Grand Inquisitor Don Alhambra del Bolero and raised incognito by the gondolier Baptisto.    The fairest way, the newly elected pair of Kings decide, is to rule jointly, “to govern as Monarchy tempered with Republican equality,” but equality proves exhausting, and the gondoliers miss their wives.  In the second act the newly rich Duke and Duchess of Plaza Toro (Phil Wilcox and Lauren Young), having monetised themselves through creating a limited company, turn up with their sparky daughter Casilda (Kelli-Ann Masterson).

The gondoliers are rescued when the contadine, led by gondoliers’ wives Tessa and Gianetta (Beth Moxon and Natasha Agarwal) defy the ban, and the evening culminates in a tambourine bashing dance, (the Cachucha), leaving Don Alhambra to warn that “when everyone is somebody, then no-one’s anybody.”

Sullivan’s superb score is conducted by Jack Ridley in one of the most special Gilbert and Sullivan evenings I’ve seen for some time. 

The Gondoliers tours with Puccini’s tragedy of Pagliacci.

Creatives

Conductor: Jack Ridley

Director: Liam Steel

Set designer: Michael Pavelka

Costume Designer:Laura Jane Stanfield

Lighting designer: Zeynep Kepekli

Production photos: Richard Hubert Smith