Trial By Jury - Productions

Productions

After the premiere of Trial by Jury in 1875, operetta companies in London, the British provinces and elsewhere picked it up rapidly, usually playing it as a forepiece or an afterpiece to a French operetta. The first American productions were at the Arch Street Theatre in Philadelphia on 22 October 1875 and the Eagle Theatre in New York City on 15 November 1875. The world tour of the original British production took it to America, Australia, and elsewhere. It was even translated into German, and premièred as Im Schwurgericht, at the Carltheater on 14 September 1886, and as Das Brautpaar vor Gericht at Danzer's Orpheum on 5 October 1901.

Richard D'Oyly Carte's opera companies (of which there were often several playing simultaneously) usually programmed Trial by Jury as a companion piece to The Sorcerer or H.M.S. Pinafore. In the 1884–85 production, a "transformation scene" was added at the end, in which the Judge and Plaintiff became the Harlequinade characters Harlequin and Columbine and the set was consumed by red fire and flames. From 1894, the year when the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company established a year-round touring company that had most of the Gilbert and Sullivan works in its repertory, Trial by Jury was always included, except for 1901–03, and then again from 1943–46, when the company played a reduced repertory during World War II.

During the company's 1975 centennial performances of all thirteen Gilbert and Sullivan Operas at the Savoy Theatre, Trial was given four times, as a curtain raiser to The Sorcerer, Pinafore and Pirates and as an afterpiece following The Grand Duke. Before the first of the four performances of Trial, a specially written curtain raiser by William Douglas-Home, called Dramatic Licence, was played by Peter Pratt as Carte, Kenneth Sandford as Gilbert and John Ayldon as Sullivan, in which Gilbert, Sullivan and Carte plan the birth of Trial in 1875. Trial by Jury was eliminated in 1976 as a cost-saving measure.