LMT Multimedia presents Lamplighters' 2026 production of IOLANTHE

Join us for a stream of Lamplighter's 2026 production of IOLANTHE on Sunday, AUGUST 23, at 4:00 PM Pacific Time! 

View the original program online at this link: https://lmt.lamplighters.org/IOL26program

Directors' Note

We have lived in and around San Francisco for decades, and the societal changes we see daily are serious and disheartening. It feels like every day another facet of what makes this city special is vanishing—a store or restaurant closing, another high-rise going up. Arts organizations are under threat, AI looms over our futures, and on many days, it feels impossible to fight for the things that brought us here. San Francisco has been magical for years, but its magic is fading. The same is happening all over the world. So, how can magic, and by magic, we mean art, fight back?

Nearly 150 years after its premiere, Iolanthe has not lost its bite. If anything, its satire of inherited power, political vanity, legal absurdity, and institutions congratulating themselves for their own importance feels more relevant than ever. Gilbert and Sullivan give us a world where the people in charge are pompous, confused, self-interested, and deeply convinced of their own wisdom. That may have seemed funny in 1882. It still does. It also feels familiar.

Fairy tales are appealing because anything can happen. Fairies are sometimes benevolent, sometimes tricky, and sometimes prone to cursing someone to sleep for 100 years just because they weren't invited to a baby shower. They are multifaceted spirits of creativity that this modern world seems to have no time for. Iolanthe is an operetta where magic pushes back like a tidal wave against entrenched thought, against patriarchy and mediocrity, against systems that exist only because they always have. The useless men who run the world don’t stand a chance against the act of creation, or the power of bringing a group of strangers together into a theatre to tell a story. This operetta is about people who break the rules, disrupt the system, throw off the bonds of tradition, and discover themselves in the space between who society tells them they should be and who they truly are.

In this production, our fairies are our storytellers, stagehands, and mischief-makers, creating the world of the opera before your eyes. We had two rules for building the world these fairies inhabit:

Rule 1: Every object onstage must be something that could be found backstage at a theatre.

Rule 2: Almost anything can be found backstage at a theatre.

Thank you for joining us as we tell this story in a new way.

Ted Zoldan, Stage Director & Jennifer Ashworth, Music Director