History
The society was formed in 1908, and the first show it performed was Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance. Until 1926, the company performed exclusively the Gilbert and Sullivan shows. After this for several decades, they performed a mix of operettas, Gilbert and Sullivan and Edwardian musical comedies. Until 1946 only one show was performed each year, but from 1946 onwards 2 shows have been played each year, with a couple of exceptions. In 1961, the company produced Me and My Girl, and thereafter generally mixed one Broadway show with one operetta or Gilbert and Sullivan opera each year. In 1986, the society produced two musicals, and since then it has focused mostly on musicals.
Productions were suspended from 1914 to 1921 and from 1939 to 1945 during to the two world wars.
The company generally produces its shows in the 600+ seat City Hall, Wiltshire's largest venue, although performances have occasionally been given at the Playhouse, Salisbury. Performance dates are usually in May and early December.
Read more about this topic: Musical Theatre Salisbury
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“The History of the world is not the theatre of happiness. Periods of happiness are blank pages in it, for they are periods of harmony—periods when the antithesis is in abeyance.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“America is the only nation in history which miraculously has gone directly from barbarism to degeneration without the usual interval of civilization.”
—Georges Clemenceau (1841–1929)
“In history the great moment is, when the savage is just ceasing to be a savage, with all his hairy Pelasgic strength directed on his opening sense of beauty;—and you have Pericles and Phidias,—and not yet passed over into the Corinthian civility. Everything good in nature and in the world is in that moment of transition, when the swarthy juices still flow plentifully from nature, but their astrigency or acridity is got out by ethics and humanity.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)