As part of its UK tour in 2019, Merry Opera is coming to the Opus

Theatre in Hastings on Saturday September 21st with an exuberant

production of Gilbert & Sullivan’s Pirates of Penzance. Buckle your

swash and enjoy an evening packed full of sentimental pirates,

blundering policemen, absurd adventures, improbable paradoxes –

and realistic women. A cocktail of Victorian light party fun with a

twist of Merry Opera.

Founded by someone who got fed up with falling asleep in operas,

Merry Opera is a professional company that has been touring for

the last 10 years, developing a reputation for staging classic operas

with a cheeky twist. This tour takes us to theatres across the UK, a

Wetherspoon pub in Tunbridge Wells and the Cutty Sark ship in

Greenwich.

 

Opera Now magazine wrote: ‘Merry Opera has a nice line in these

slightly off-beat touring shows, performing them with charm,

energy and wit’. The Daily Telegraph wrote: ‘The future of opera is

being seeded here, and it needs nurturing’.

 

Our singers go on to Glyndebourne, Grange Park, Wexford and

young artists’ programmes in Frankfurt, Stuttgart and Freiburg. The

leading ladies in our la Traviata which we toured to Malaysia in

2012 were snapped up by Wexford and Vienna for that same role.

One of our singers won the UK Bayreuth Wagner prize and has since

sung at the Royal Opera House and the Festival Hall.

 

The Pirates is directed by John Ramster, who trained under Clare

Venables at Glyndebourne and now combines teaching opera

stagecraft at the Royal Academy of Music and at the Guildhall in

London with an international career. His work takes him to Serbia,

Portugal, Denmark, France, Finland and most recently Norway,

where he directed Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, and will take him to

Iceland in 2019. He has created original operas for Merry Opera,

including a staged production of Handel’s Messiah that has been

touring to much acclaim to churches every year since 2011.