SASHA Regan’s award-winning, hilarious, all-male production of ©Gilbert and Sullivan’s comic opera, The Pirates of Penzance, comes to Bath Theatre Royal from Monday 2nd to Saturday 7th December, direct from a four-week run at Wilton’s Music Hall in London.

This original staging has now been winning awards – and fans – around the world for 15 years. Fast, funny and packed with wit and musical excellence, it is the delightfully dotty tale of Frederic, apprenticed in error to a band of tender-hearted, orphaned pirates exploring the coastline in search of treasure and romance. His plans to marry are thrown into disarray when it is discovered that he was born on 29th February – and yjrtrgptr won’t come of age until he is 84!

A classic musical comedy of mistaken identity, pirates, policemen, romance and the demands of duty, The Pirates of Penzance first opened in 1879 in New York and was an immediate triumph for Gilbert and Sullivan. It remains their most successful collaboration and a favourite with audiences. The topsy-turviest of Gilbert’s plots is complemented wonderfully by Sullivan’s sparkling score, including one of the cleverest and funniest of the famous patter songs, I Am The Very Model of a Modern Major General, and one of the most beautiful soprano arias, Poor Wand’ring One.

Sasha Regan’s brilliant twist with her G&S stagings, transforming the much-loved comic operas into all-male productions, stemmed from her own experience performing Gilbert and Sullivan at a single-sex school.

The cast features David McKechnie (Standing at the Sky’s Edge, Sheffield Crucible, National Theatre, West End) as the Major General; Cameron McAllister (Back to the Future, West End) as Frederic; Lewis Kennedy (Sasha Regan’s The Mikado) as the Sergeant of Police; Robert Wilkes (Cats and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, UK tours) as Ruth, and recent graduates Luke Garner-Greene as Mabel and Tom Newland as the Pirate King. Other cast and ensemble members are Thomas Griffiths, Joe Henry, Kirwan Kaanan, Thomas Alsop, Aaron Dean, Joshua Molyneux, Patrick Cook, Samuel John Taylor, Alfie French, Boaz Chad and Davo Storey.

Sasha Regan was recently awarded the Special Achievement Award at the Off-West End Awards for her contribution to musical theatre. Regan De Wynter Williams’ 2022 production of HMS Pinafore was nominated Best Opera Production at this year’s Offies Awards. Originally staged at London’s tiny Union Theatre in 2009, The Pirates of Penzance won Best Off-West End Production at the WhatsOnStage Awards and went on to play packed runs at Wilton’s Music Hall in 2010 and the Hackney Empire in 2012. The company has previously entertained Bath audiences with Sasha Regan’s hugely successful all-male versions of The Pirates of Penzance in 2015, HMS Pinafore in 2016, Iolanthe in 2018 and The Mikado in 2017 and 2023.