Opera della Luna

Opera della Luna, founded in 1994, is a British touring theatre troupe of actor-singers focusing on comic works. Led by artistic director Jeff Clarke, it takes its name from Haydn's operatic setting of Goldoni's farce Il mondo della luna. The company presents innovative, usually zany and irreverent, small-scale productions and adaptations of Gilbert and Sullivan, other comic opera and operetta, in English. Opera della Luna is a registered British charity.

The company undertakes two major tours each year, visiting over a hundred mid-scale venues throughout the UK. Occasionally the company has toured overseas. Clarke directs all of the productions, which are small-scale adaptations performed without chorus, accompanied by a small orchestral ensemble.

In 1986, Clarke founded The English Players, a touring opera ensemble. Clarke's productions for that company included English-language adaptations of Love in a Village (which toured as far as Denver, Colorado), Boieldieu’s The Caliph of Bagdad and Abu Hassan (two one-act operas presented together), Il mondo della luna and Robinson Crusoé. After four years, Clark disbanded The English Players while he planned for a new, better-funded company.

With the help of marketer and versatile theatre professional Graham Watson, Clarke established Opera della Luna as a registered charity with a board of directors and a base of regular supporters. The company's name was intended to convey its zany style of adaptation. The company's first production, in 1994, was Robinson Crusoé. Plagued by transit strikes, the show lost money. Clarke and friends made up part of the deficit by playing evenings of music hall concerts.

The company achieved its first theatrical financial success in 1995 with Clarke's adaptation of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Pirates of Penzance called The Parson's Pirates, about the vicar of St Michael's Under Ware, who is tasked with raising church funds through an amateur production of Pirates. The original idea had been merely to produce an evening of Gilbert and Sullivan hits with five singers. Clarke wrote, in his 2010 memoir,

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