Martyn Green was one of the Great D'oyly Carte patter singers. This book has the libretti of all of the shows, except for Utopia and Grand Duke, and Simary arrangements of the music. It is a great first book for any lover of G&S and a must have for anyone with any interest in G&S.

If there would be a criticism, it would be the relative lack of explainations of some of the more obscure words in the cannon, but this can be remedied by reference to the Harry Benford Lexicon (also available from Amazon). And the little bits about production practice which litter the libretti, more than make up for this.

The other drawback is the absurd decision not to keep this book in print.

This book was my first exposure to Gilbert and Sullivan, and this book can take a large part of the credit for my continued love of G&S. The book contains the libretti of all but two of the Operetta's (sadly lacking in Grand Duke and Utopia, Ltd) which are annotated with explainations of some of the terms, and comments from Martyn Green, both about how D'Oyly Carte performed it as well as personal recollections. The book also contains wonderful illustrations by Lucile Cocoros and Piano Transcriptions of a number of songs by Alfred Sirmay. (The Piano transcriptions and the Cocoros illustrations are recycled from the 1941 Deems Taylor G&S Volume.. this one is MUCH better because of the libretti and the fact that Green, unlike Taylor, clearly loved the work of G&S and didn't appear to have an axe to grind because the public didn't like his compositions as well as that of Sullivan...) It is a criminal shame that this book has been allowed to go out of print. It is becoming harder and harder to find and is a very important part of anyone who likes G&S's library..