Gilbert & Sullivan Austin's Annual Meeting features Susan Ellerby’s Gilbert and Sullivan’s Improbable New Musical: Less Miserable, which premiered at the 2019 Edinburgh Festival Fringe. In the afterlife, Gilbert boasts to Sullivan that, as the fathers of modern musical theatre, they created the plots behind nearly every musical that followed. Sullivan challenges him to prove it by retelling Les Misérables using only Gilbert and Sullivan songs. Gilbert accepts with one condition: he gets to add a few twists and give the story an implausibly happy ending in which nobody dies. Less Miserable transforms the familiar epic into a fast-paced, 55-minute Gilbertian comedy featuring songs from across the Gilbert and Sullivan canon.
