Robert Reece

Robert Reece (2 May 1838 – 8 July 1891) was a British comic playwright and librettist active in the Victorian era. He wrote many successful musical burlesques, comic operas, farces and adaptations from the French, including the English-language adaptation of the operetta Les cloches de Corneville, which became the longest-running piece of musical theatre in history up to that time. He sometimes collaborated with Henry Brougham Farnie or others.

Reece was born in the island of Barbados, West Indies. His father, Robert Reece (1808–1874), was a barrister of the Inner Temple. Reece matriculated from Balliol College, Oxford in 1857 and received his B.A. in 1860 and his M.A. in 1864. He was admitted a student at the Inner Temple in 1860 but was not called to the bar. For a short time he was a medical student. Between 1861 and 1863, he was an extra clerk in the office of the ecclesiastical commissioners, and from 1864 to 1868 an extra temporary clerk to the emigration commissioners.

From the 1860s to the 1880s, Reece wrote comic pieces for the stage with fair success, often adapting three-act European operettas into two-act English-language pieces. He even scored a number of hits, including his adaptation of Les cloches de Corneville, which ran for over 700 performances in 1878–79, the longest run in the history of musical theatre up to that time.

Reece's first professionally produced effort was the libretto of an operetta, Castle Grim, with music by G. Allen, produced at the Royalty Theatre in 1865. Among his subsequent contributions to the same stage were the burlesques Prometheus (1865),The Lady of the Lake (1866), and Whittington Junior and his Sensation Cat (1871, starring Fred Sullivan and Henrietta Hodson). He also wrote for the Royalty Dora's Device, a comedietta (1871),Little Robin Hood, a burlesque (1871), revived at the Gaiety Theatre (1882), and Paquita, or Love in a Trance, a comic opera with music by J. A. Mallandine (1871).

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