This year’s concert-staged performance selection of Gilbert & Sullivan’s H.M.S. Pinafore, directed by Opera Fort Collins artistic director Brian Luedloff, is a comic opera in two acts that takes place, as the title suggests, aboard a ship. The captain’s daughter, Josephine, is promised to marry a high-ranking naval officer, but is in love with a lower-class sailor. Despite her intentions to honor her father’s wishes of marrying the officer, Josephine and her lowly sailor plan to elope. While the captain soon learns of their plans, a surprise revelation changes the course of the story dramatically, as is the case in many Gilbert & Sullivan plots.

All in great fun, the story pokes at the ideas of patriotism, party politics, the Royal Navy, and the rise of unqualified people to positions of authority. Received with much success when it opened in 1878, H.M.S. Pinafore ran for 571 performances – the second-longest run of any musical theatre piece up to that time. Its extreme popularity, the fourth operatic collaboration of the Gilbert & Sullivan duo, became one of the works that dominated the musical stage on both sides of the Atlantic for more than a decade, and continues to be performed today.