“A Gilbert and Sullivan Drawing Room” cleverly combines a Zoom meeting, the lives of G&S, and musical highlights from past VLOC productions, such as the close to “The Gondoliers,” pictured above. Photo by Harvey Levine.
In what it bills as its first film, Victorian Lyric Opera Company of Rockville, Maryland, has produced “A Gilbert and Sullivan Drawing Room.” Directed by Erica Ferguson with cinematography by Scott Nunn, this production uses an online Zoom meeting as a framing device. The show begins as a video meeting between an uninterested teenager, her eccentric grandfather, and several other characters playing a trivia game together. This serves as the point of entrance to the main story, which is a fabulous exploration of the lives and careers of the famous duo, lyricist W.S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan.