Join your friends for an evening of fabulous music and fine dining at our April Dinner and a Diva. You’ll hear highlights from Gilbert & Sullivan's Pirates of Penzance, on Tuesday, April 16 or Friday, April 19.
Performing for you are members of the Capitol City Opera Company: Robin Sewell as Mabel, Laurie Tossing as Ruth, Truman Griffin—who will be making his Dinner and a Diva debut—singing the role of Frederic, Ivan Segovia as the Pirate King, and Jonathan Spuhler as The Modern-General Stanley. They will be accompanied by the company's musical director, Catherine Giel.
In addition to an evening of music, you'll enjoy a wonderful fixed-price, four-course dinner paired with wine, leaving you with an evening to remember. Your dinner will include a sampling of premium hors d' oeuvres, fresh salad, choice of two gourmet entrees, decadent dessert, hot coffee/tea, and two glasses of fine wine, all for only $65 per person (tax included; gratuity separate). The performers sing between each course.
The Pirates of Penzance, or The Slave of Duty, official premiered at the Fifth Avenue Theater in New York City, on December 31, 1879, where the show was well-received by both audiences and critics. Its London debut was on April 3, 1880, at the Opera Comique, where it ran for 363 performances, having already been playing successfully for more than three months in New York.
Pirates was the only Gilbert and Sullivan opera to have its official premiere in the U.S. At the time, U.S. law offered no copyright protection to foreigners. By opening the production themselves on Broadway, prior to the London production, they succeeded in keeping for themselves the direct profits of the first American production, and they also operated profitable US touring companies of Pirates and Pinafore. However they, and their producer, Richard D'Oyly Carte, failed in their efforts, over the next decade, to control the American performance copyrights to Pirates and their other operas.
The evening is Sponsored by Bob and Karen Coleman.
