Coily Dart presents Susan Ellerby's 'Gilbert and Sullivan's Improbable New Musical: Less Miserable'

Coily Dart presents Gilbert and Sullivan's Improbable New Musical: Less Miserable in Austin on Sunday, January 10, 2027. It's a free performance, part of the group's annual meeting, and it's a piece that's been around the block a bit—it premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe and has since become a staple of the Gilbert and Sullivan repertoire.

The whole thing is built on a single, pretty funny conceit. The action takes place in the afterlife, where Gilbert is bragging to Sullivan that, as the fathers of modern musical theatre, they wrote the plots behind nearly every musical that followed. Sullivan isn't buying it and challenges him to prove it by retelling Les Misérables using only Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Gilbert accepts on one condition: he gets to add a few twists and give the story an implausibly happy ending in which nobody dies.

What comes out of that is a fast-paced, 55-minute Gilbertian comedy that works its way through the familiar epic using songs from across the Gilbert and Sullivan canon. If you know Les Misérables, you'll recognize the beats; if you know G&S, you'll recognize the music. The two run side by side for the whole hour, and the comedy comes from the gap between the two—the high drama of the original story meeting the light, patter-filled style of the G&S songs. It's a short show, so it doesn't overstay its welcome, and it doesn't ask you to be an expert in either one to get the joke.

It's a free performance, so you can just show up and see it without worrying about tickets. The show is presented by Coily Dart as part of their annual meeting, and it runs on Sunday, January 10, 2027, here in Austin.