What is it about this show that can prompt a lifetime of obsession?

In Victorian Opera’s rehearsal space, the cast assemble to run through With Cat-Like Tread, a raucous number from near the end of The Pirates of Penzance.

The number sees the pirate crew preparing to break into the Major-General’s house and murder him. The cast, including Ben Mingay as the Pirate King, Nicholas Jones as Frederic and Nina Korbe as Mabel, wave sticks of dowel, standing in for swords and batons. On stage at Palais Theatre, the pirate ship and sets will be large painted flats on wheels, like a live-action cartoon.

On January 31 Victorian Opera will present the umpteenth staging of The Pirates of Penzance. And for the umpteenth time, it’ll be a hit.

W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan wrote 14 comic operas together between 1871 and 1896, including Pirates, HMS Pinafore, and The Mikado. Something about them still works. Music, of course, is timeless. But it’s not often that jokes hold up 150 years on.

Pirates is funny. Our hero, Frederic, is apprenticed to pirates because his nursemaid misheard his father’s wishes for him to be an apprentice pilot. The hapless gang, all orphans, routinely free their captives if they too claim to be orphans. Needless to say, word gets around, and they’re easily fooled. “When you say orphan, you mean a person who’s lost his parents, or ‘often’ – frequently?”

A century later, these jokes would have been called Pythonesque. At the time, they were Gilbertian. There’s a delight in wordplay and an enduring mischief.

Victorian Opera artistic director Stuart Maunder is a lifelong Gilbert and Sullivan devotee. He says they’re built to last. “So many musicals and operas from the 20th century just don’t work today, but Gilbert and Sullivan still does … They’re better constructed. They’re character-driven rather than gag-driven.”

Maunder, who is directing this production, knows a thing or two about Gilbert and Sullivan. For five decades he’s directed their work everywhere from high schools to the Sydney Opera House. In university, he had a turn as the Pirate King.

“I love the language and I love the music,” he says. “My first experience with classical music was through this stuff. Even now, I still hear people say that their parents or their grandparents took them to see these shows, and that started a lifelong obsession with theatre.”

Maunder reels off the names of people who have taken influence from Gilbert and Sullivan. Freddie Mercury. Cole Porter. Noel Coward. Lin-Manuel Miranda. Gustav Holst. I’ll add the Muppets and the Minions to that list.

Upstairs in Maunder’s office the full extent of the passion becomes apparent. There are shelves full of reference books about Gilbert and Sullivan, a glass cabinet full of ceramic Toby Jugs of G&S characters, and folders of century-old programs and flyers for old G&S productions. I spot a cassette of some of his early work, a high school production of Trial By Jury. This is the tip of the iceberg – he’s got more at home and more in storage. I politely describe it as an interest, and then a passion.

“It’s an obsession,” he corrects me. “I’ve been collecting pretty much since I was 16.”

Maunder first encountered Gilbert and Sullivan when he saw the Boggabri Amateur Dramatic Society’s production of Pirates. “I would have been seven or eight,” he says. “Our vicar, Reverend Taylor, played the Pirate King. I remember, to this day, the barrel down-stage with a skull and crossbones on it.”

The following year he was given a walk-on role as the Midshipmite in HMS Pinafore. His theatre career, and his lifelong Gilbert and Sullivan obsession, began in earnest.

Gilbert and Sullivan operas have always been a hit here in Melbourne too. Maunder says that the popularity of Gilbert and Sullivan has always helped fund companies’ other, less crowd-pleasing performances.

When the official production of HMS Pinafore arrived in town in 1879, there were already at least two bootleg versions running in theatres on Bourke Street – one starring renowned soprano Nellie Stewart, and one starring renowned drag queen Francis Leon. Melbourne never changes.

Just when it looked like the duo’s popularity was fading, the 1981 Broadway production of Pirates, directed by Wilford Leach and starring Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt was a hit, a century after its premiere. That version was a hit in Australia too, starring Jon English and Marina Prior.

This 2026 iteration, Maunder adds, is a genuine showcase for operatic talent.

“People like Nina Korbe, who plays Mabel – that’s a serious operatic voice,” he says. “The tenor, too, Nicholas Jones [as Frederic]. It allows them a chance to strut their stuff vocally, which I don’t think you often get with general musical theatre.

“The joy of it is that it hasn’t changed,” says Maunder. “Gilbert and Sullivan are still relevant, still funny and quaint and all those things, if it’s done with huge energy and huge love.”

Victorian Opera’s Pirates of Penzance is at Palais Theatre from January 31 to February 6.

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