The Happy Land is a play with music written in 1873 by W. S. Gilbert (under the pseudonym F. Latour Tomline) and Gilbert Arthur à Beckett. The musical play burlesques Gilbert's earlier play, The Wicked World. The blank verse piece opened at the Royal Court Theatre on 3 March 1873 and enjoyed a highly successful run, soon touring, and then being immediately revived at the same theatre in the autumn of 1873.
The play created a scandal by breaking regulations against the portrayal of public characters, parodying William Ewart Gladstone, Robert Lowe, and Acton Smee Ayrton, respectively the Prime Minister, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and First Commissioner of Works. Three characters were made up and costumed to look like the caricatures of Gladstone, Lowe and Ayrton that had appeared in Vanity Fair. The scandal was great enough to be included in the Annual Register's "Chronicle of Remarkable Occurrences." The play was censored by Britain's Lord Chamberlain, which ironically caused it to become unusually popular.
The Happy Land also anticipated some of the themes in the political satire seen in the Gilbert and Sullivan operas, including unqualified people in positions of authority, like Sir Joseph in H.M.S. Pinafore, selecting government by "competitive examination" as in Iolanthe, and especially the importation of English exemplars to "improve" a naive civilisation, as in Utopia, Limited.
Read more about The Happy Land: Background, Roles and Original Cast, Synopsis, Musical Numbers, Antecedents and Development of Gilbertian Satire
Famous quotes containing the words happy and/or land:
“Much more frequent in Hollywood than the emergence of Cinderella is her sudden vanishing. At our party, even in those glowing days, the clock was always striking twelve for someone at the height of greatness; and there was never a prince to fetch her back to the happy scene.”
—Ben Hecht (1893–1964)
“They commonly celebrate those beaches only which have a hotel on them, not those which have a humane house alone. But I wished to see that seashore where man’s works are wrecks; to put up at the true Atlantic House, where the ocean is land-lord as well as sea-lord, and comes ashore without a wharf for the landing; where the crumbling land is the only invalid, or at best is but dry land, and that is all you can say of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)