After a successful run at the Coralville Center for the Performing Arts last weekend, the University of Iowa Opera Theater will bring its production of the timeless Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta H.M.S. Pinafore to the Hoyt Sherman Place in Des Moines July 20-21.

Director John Cameron, faculty member in the Department of Theatre Arts in the UI College of Liberal Arts and Sciences, discusses the challenges of making the operetta, first performed in 1878 at the Opera Comique in London, relevant and engaging for an audience in 2012.

H.M.S. Pinafore has been popular since 1878. As a director and playwright, what ingredients do you think have made this opera a perennial favorite for 133 years?

When it was first written it was intended as popular entertainment—to make money. The script is full of contemporary references that would have brought laughter from an audience at the time. It's also full of awkward and implausible situations. The fact that the Captain marries Buttercup at the end of the play is the best example. She was his wet nurse and raised him, and at the very least should be 18 years his senior, and yet they seem to not know each other and are consistently played as being similar ages. All this was overlooked for the good fun that the play provided. I think it's ultimately the music that has preserved it and kept it popular with audiences almost 150 years later.