A selection of programmes through the ages

Gilbert & Sullivan's 'The Pirates of Penzance' was our very first show at Harpenden Public Halls in April 1951

Gilbert & Sullivan's 3rd collaboration, based on a Christmas story, An Elixir of Love, that Gilbert wrote for The Graphic magazine in 1876.

Our first non G&S was The Desert Song, an operetta inspired by the 1925 uprising of the Riffs, a group of Moroccan fighters, against French colonial rule. Music by Sigmund Romberg and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel.

Widely beloved and arguably Kálmán’s most successful work and one of the “pinnacles of Viennese operetta”, his 1915 Die Csárdásfürstin (The Gipsy Princess) includes some of the most delightful operetta melodies ever written.

Our 10th anniversary year saw us perform Gilbert & Sullivan's 12th comic opera 'The Gondoliers' for the 2nd time. It was their last great success, running for a very successful 554 performances from 1889 to 1891, at the time becoming the fifth longest-running piece of musical theatre in history.

This was our 1st time performing Oklahoma, which is known as the single, most influential work in American musical theatre. It epitomizes the development of the "book musical", a musical that fully integrates songs and dances with a well-made story, featuring musical themes and serious dramatic goals that evoke genuine emotions other than laughter. 

Ruddigore is a topsy-turvy take on Victorian melodrama and was the 2nd attempt at the tale. Gilbert & Sullivan respelled the title and made a number of changes and cuts from the original. It was less successful than most of their earlier collaborations. 

Summer Song  was only 13 years old when we performed it. Premiering in 1956, the musical is based Dvorak's visit to Iowa, where he wrote his 'From the New World' symphony.

This comic opera with music by Offenbach is his first full-length opera. The original 1858 production was a box-office success, and the 1874 revival broke box office records. It is Offenbach's most often performed work and is a lampoon of the ancient legend of Orpheus and Eurydice, where Orpheus is not the son of Apollo but a rustic violin teacher. 

Who would have thought a musical about the Austrian Anschluss that the New York Herald Tribune dismissed as 'icky sticky' would become one of the most comercially successful films of all time? 1971 was the first time we climbed every mountain and discovered our favourite things!

The Mikado is Gilbert & Sullivan's most successful operetta, and one of the most frequently played musical theatre pieces in history. We have performed it in every single decade, bar the 2010s. The story makes fun of English bureaucracy, thinly disguised in a Japanese setting.

Our 25th anniversary show was a G&S double-bill featyring Pirates of Penzance (our first show) and Trial by Jury

Lehar's operetta 'The Merry Widow' is based on an 1861 comedy play, L'attaché d'ambassade (The Embassy Attaché) by Henri Meilhac, and tells the story of a rich widow, and her countrymen's attempt to keep her money in the principality by finding her the right husband.

With music and lyrics by Irving Berlin, Annie Get Your Gun is a fictionalized version of the life of Annie Oakley, a sharpshooter who starred in Buffalo Bill's Wild West, and her romance with another sharpshooter Frank E. Butler.

This was our 2nd time performing Lerner & Loewe's musical based on George Bernard Shaw's 1913 play Pygmalion, about Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who takes speech lessons from professor Henry Higgins, a phonetician, so that she may pass as a lady.

This is the one and only time we have performed Hello Dolly, a 1964 musical with lyrics and music by Jerry Herman, based on Thornton Wilder's 1938 farce The Merchant of Yonkers, which Wilder revised and retitled The Matchmaker in 1955. It tells the story of Dolly Gallagher Levi, a strong-willed matchmaker, as she travels to Yonkers, New York, to find a match for the miserly "well-known unmarried half-a-millionaire" Horace Vandergelder.

Another show we've only done once in 70 years, Kander & Ebb's 'Cabaret'. Set in 1931 Berlin as the Nazis are rising to power, it focuses on the nightlife at the seedy Kit Kat Klub, and the relationship between English cabaret performer Sally Bowles and American writer Cliff Bradshaw. The musical is based on John Van Druten's 1951 play I Am a Camera, which in turn was adapted from Christopher Isherwood's 1939 short novel 'Goodbye to Berlin'. 

This was the 2nd time we had performed Lionel Bart's family favourite 'Oliver!'. This is a show we have performed in every decade since the 1970s, the most recent incarnation performed in October 2018.

Bizet's 'Carmen', was our first production of a full-length opera. Set in southern Spain, it tells the tale of the downfall of Don José, a naïve soldier who is seduced by the wiles of the fiery gypsy Carmen. We revisited Carmen in 2004.

Based on the 1905 novel Kipps by H. G. Wells, it tells the tale of Arthur Kipps, an orphan who unexpectedly inherits a fortune, and climbs the social ladder before losing everything and realizing that you just can't buy happiness. 'Half a Sixpence' was originally written as a vehicle for Tommy Steele who appeared in the original London & Boadway productions as well as the 1967 film. 

This Noel Gay musical is set in the late 1930s and tells the story of an unapologetically unrefined cockney gentleman named Bill Snibson, who learns that he is the 14th heir to the Earl of Hareford. This is the musical that had everyone doing the Lambeth Walk!

Set in the carefree world of the French Riviera in the Roaring Twenties, it’s Carnival time on the French Riviera, and the “perfect young ladies” of Madame Dubonnet’s Finishing School are all aflutter with excitement at the opportunity to dress in beautiful frocks, dance the Charleston, and acquire that most prized of possessions - a Boy Friend. This light romantic spoof of a 1920s musical comedy is still considered the most successful and witty of the send-up musicals.

What better show to celebrate our 50th anniversary with than Pirates. But this was the 1981 'Broadway' version, a revival of the original G&S show by Joe Papp, featuring a more swashbuckling Pirate King and Frederic, and a broader, more musical comedy style of singing and humour.

Another updated G&S favourite, this time reworked for the 21st century by the Australian company Essgee Entertainment.

The King and I is another show we've only done once. It is the fifth Rodgers and Hammerstein musical and is based on Margaret Landon's novel, Anna and the King of Siam, which takes its plot from the memoirs of Anna Leonowens, governess to the children of King Mongkut of Siam in the early 1860s.

Take everyone's favourite Gilbert & Sullivan operetta and reorchestrate it using 1940s popular musical harmonies, arrangements and a wide range of styles, including jazz, hot gospel, blues, rock, Cab Calloway swing, and torch songs, and you get the Hot Mikado. 

Sweet Charity, another lone production, is a musical with music by Cy Coleman, lyrics by Dorothy Fields and book by Neil Simon, and based on the screenplay for the 1957 Italian film Nights of Cabiria. 

It was all aboard the SS American for the second time in 2010 when we performed Cole Porter's 'Anything Goes'. The original book was a collaborative effort by Guy Bolton and P. G. Wodehouse, and concerns madcap antics aboard an ocean liner bound from New York to London.

Frank Loesser's musical Guys & Dolls, is based on Damon Runyon's short stories "The Idyll of Miss Sarah Brown" and "Blood Pressure". It also borrows characters and plot elements from other Runyon stories.

The Witches of Eastwick, is a 2000 musical adapted from the 1984 novel by American writer John Updike, by John Dempsey and Dana P Rowe. 

The musical based on the comic strip Little Orphan Annie has been around since 1977, and 2015 was the third time we performed this musical.

The 21st century has seen a number of films turned into musicals. Based on the hit Adam Sandler movie, The Wedding Singer is the 80s revisited, when big phones, big shoulder pads and even bigger hair were in fashion.

Based on Whoopi Goldberg's film, Sister Act the Musical had Harpenden audiences on their feet! The musical is a sparkling tribute to the universal power of friendship, filled with powerful gospel music, outrageous dancing and a truly moving story.