La Vivandière (Gilbert)

La Vivandière; or, True to the Corps! is a burlesque by W. S. Gilbert, described by the author as "An Operatic Extravaganza Founded on Donizetti's Opera, La figlia del regimento." In the French or other continental armies a vivandière was a woman who supplied food and drink to troops in the field.

The piece was first produced at St. James's Hall, Liverpool, on 15 June 1867. It was then presented in London, with a mostly new cast, at the Queen's Theatre, Long Acre, opening on 22 January 1868. It was part of a series of operatic burlesques and other broad comic pieces that Gilbert wrote in the late 1860s near the beginning of his playwriting career. It was modestly successful and introduced some themes and satiric techniques that Gilbert would later employ in his famous Savoy operas.

Gilbert's first operatic burlesque, Dulcamara, or the Little Duck and the Great Quack, had been successful enough to encourage him to write another. It had run for 120 nights, from Christmas 1866 to Easter 1867, a good run for the London theatre of that time. As with Dulcamara, Gilbert based La Vivandière on a comic opera by Donizetti, using the composer's tunes, and those of other composers, and fitting new words to them.

The work was premiered in Liverpool, by Maria Simpson's Opera Company, billed as "The new, original, and brilliant Operatic Extravaganza ... from the pen of W. S. Gilbert, Esq." The Gilbert scholar Jane Stedman writes that the subtitle was a topical allusion to a popular melodrama, True to the Core; A Story of the Armada. In the Victorian era theatre managers normally bought or licensed plays from authors, and the authors had nothing to do with the staging of the works. Like his mentor Tom Robertson, however, Gilbert was not content to be merely the author, but sought to influence the staging of his works as much as a playwright was allowed to do. The press announcements for the Liverpool production stated that the piece was being staged under the author's "immediate superintendence". Once established, Gilbert would stage direct nearly all of his own shows. It is not clear how much the Liverpool and London productions differed. Stedman notes that Gilbert made a number of changes to the libretto for the London production. The staging of the two productions was in wholly different hands: W. H. Montgomery and George Vinning, respectively musical director and scene painter in Liverpool, were replaced by Mr. Wallerstein and T. Grieve in London, and an almost completely new cast was selected.

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