Haste to the Wedding

The piece was produced under the management of Charles Wyndham at the Criterion Theatre, London, opening on 27 July 1892.

On 15 November 1873, Gilbert's play The Wedding March debuted at the Court Theatre, written under his pseudonym F. Latour Tomline.

It was a free adaptation of Eugène Marin Labiche's Un chapeau de paille d'Italie ("The Italian Straw Hat").

The play was first to have been called Hunting a Hat, but the title was changed to capitalise on the popularity of the wedding march from Wagner's Lohengrin.

[2] On the play's success, Stedman notes: The Era commented that there was "enough fun... to make half-a-dozen ordinary farces."

[5] The play was given as part of a benefit matinee at the Gaiety Theatre, London, on 4 December 1884 with a cast starring Lionel Brough and Lydia Thompson.

Arthur Sullivan would have composed the score, and the composer's brother Fred (Trial's Learned Judge) would have played the bridegroom, Woodpecker Tapping, but the opera didn't materialise, perhaps due to the illness that ultimately led to Fred's early death.

He wrote The Mountebanks with Alfred Cellier, and then turned to George Grossmith, the comic baritone of the Gilbert and Sullivan pieces from The Sorcerer (1877) through to The Yeomen of the Guard (1888).

Grossmith had composed hundreds of songs and duets for his own private drawing-room entertainments, as well as a few short comic operas, but never a full-length work as ambitious as Haste to the Wedding.

Notable among the cast were Frank Wyatt as Woodpecker Tapping, veteran actor Lionel Brough (Pietro in The Mountebanks) as Maguire, and George Grossmith Jr., the composer's son, in his stage debut as Foodle.

[6] The writer Kurt Gänzl sums up the failure: At Chichester (1975) and Exeter (1976), an adaptation was created using Gilbert's The Wedding March as a starting point, adding the lyrics and music from Haste to the Wedding, as well as additional original lyrics written to music adapted from Jacques Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue.

Leonora, the lady whose hat Woodpecker's horse had chewed up, arrives with Captain Bapp, her cousin.

Woodpecker apologises to them, and offers more money, but they insist he must replace the hat, as Leonora's husband is insanely jealous and won't forgive her if she returns without it.

Woodpecker needs an excuse to stop at a milliner's shop on the way to the registrar, so he tells them that he's lost the marriage license.

Woodpecker observes that the bride's family are country people and won't know the difference between a Doctor's Commons and a milliner's shop.

Bella, the milliner, recognises Woodpecker, who had once proposed marriage and then abandoned her; he insists that he still intends to abide by his promise.

Bella agrees to give him a fine straw hat, provided that he takes her to lunch that afternoon and to the theatre that evening.

When Cripps, the milliner's bookkeeper, enters, they mistake him for the Registrar, and confusion ensues as they try to dictate their names to him as if to obtain a marriage license.

Bella tells Woodpecker that she can't match the kind of straw hat that he is looking for, and she cannot get another one like it for three weeks.

The Duke of Turniptopshire arrives at the Marchioness of Market Harborough's home for a concert by the Italian falsetto singer, Nisnardi.

He has told them that the Marchioness's home is St. James's Hall, and that he is inside making arrangements for the wedding breakfast.

When she quotes from Nisnardi's note, Woodpecker realises the confusion, but before he can explain, the Marchioness's guests arrive for the concert.

Playing along, Woodpecker tells them that his voice has deserted him, but he will be able to sing if the Marchioness indulges his whim – he wants her straw hat.

The maid explains that the Marchioness gave her white straw hat to her niece, Mrs. Major-General Bunthunder.

Maguire assumes that Woodpecker is getting dressed behind the screen and advises him that if he wants a happy marriage, "In all things give into your wife."

Vowing to get Maria a divorce and marry her to Foodle, he orders Jackson to retrieve all the wedding gifts.