Who was Polly Toddleposh?

How the short show Trial by Jury became even shorter.

Linda Verner was a busy young woman on that chilly Thursday of March 25, 1875.

Miss Verner was a bit of a star that evening at Soho’s Royalty Theatre. She wasn’t just the First Bridesmaid in the premiere of a new piece called Trial by Jury. She also played two roles in the main event of the night, Jacques Offenbach’s comic opera La Périchole. The street singers Guadalena and Manuelita are entirely different characters in the story, but energetic Linda played them both that night.

But before all this stage time, our Linda was the romantic lead in the opening curtain-raiser. She played the gloriously named Polly Toddleposh in Cryptoconchoidsyphonostomata, a wonderfully daft farce by R. H. Edgar and Charles Collette. The plot revolved around a common Victorian trope: a stern father forbidding his daughter to marry an unsuitable suitor.

This time the suitor, played by Charles Collette himself, performs a preposterous, rapid-fire declamation of his talents and scientific abilities—accompanying himself from time to time on a banjo. This breathless performance is enough to wring consent from his prospective father-in-law, and, of course, the piece ends happily.

It is a telling clue to popular musical tastes just before the Gilbert and Sullivan era exploded that the hit song from Cryptoconchoidsyphonostomata was a rather dire piece called What an Afternoon! Unsurprisingly, it was lost to history while Sullivan’s music went on to eternal glory.

So what has all this to do with the playing length of Trial by Jury?

Trial was the last of the three performances that evening. It is interesting to speculate that it was originally tacked onto the end of the schedule merely to give the theatre another lucrative drinks break following the main event.

Because the evening was so incredibly crowded, theatre manager Richard D’Oyly Carte was facing a race against the clock. To ensure patrons could actually catch their late-night cabs and trains home, the production team was forced to make ruthless, last-minute cuts to Gilbert and Sullivan’s brand-new, unseen show.

The casualties of that ticking clock? A grand, operatic recitative and solo for the Usher, and a beautifully comic solo number known as “The Foreman’s Prayer.” They were stripped from the performance copy, leaving the Foreman with a vastly reduced role and shortening the briefest show in the G&S canon even further.

In our production, we are putting the clock back. Come and hear Trial by Jury exactly as Gilbert and Sullivan originally wrote it, featuring the historic revival of these two lost musical gems!