Cups and Saucers

Cups and Saucers is a one-act "satirical musical sketch" written and composed by George Grossmith. The piece pokes fun at the china collecting craze of the later Victorian era, which was part of the Aesthetic movement later satirised in Patience and The Colonel. Cups and Saucers premiered in 1876 as part of an evening of piano sketches by Grossmith and was adopted by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in 1878 as a curtain raiser to H.M.S. Pinafore and, later, other operas.

Cups and Saucers was first produced in 1876 on tour as a vehicle for Grossmith and Florence Marryat, as part of Entre Nous, their series of piano sketches. It was then performed by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company from August 1878 to February 1880 at the Opera Comique as a curtain raiser to H.M.S. Pinafore. It was also toured by that company in 1883 (with Iolanthe) and in 1884 and was revived in 1890 at the Globe Theatre (from 6 to 12 December for 6 performances, as the curtain raiser to Richard Temple's production of Gounod's The Mock Doctor). The piece was recorded by Retrospect Opera in 2016, together with F. C. Burnand and Edward Solomon's Pickwick.

The piece runs about 25 minutes. The fashion in the late Victorian era was to present long evenings in the theatre, and so producer Richard D'Oyly Carte preceded his Savoy operas with curtain raisers such as Cups and Saucers.W. J. MacQueen-Pope commented, concerning such curtain raisers:

...
Wikipedia