Our Island Home

Our Island Home is a one-act musical entertainment with a libretto by W. S. Gilbert and music by Thomas German Reed that premiered on June 20, 1870 at the Royal Gallery of Illustration. The piece has five characters and is "biographical", in that the characters in the original production played themselves, except that they were given personalities opposite to their actual personalities. This work is the third in a series of six one-act musical plays written by Gilbert for Thomas German Reed and his wife Priscilla between 1869 and 1875. The German Reeds presented respectable, family-friendly musical entertainments at their Gallery of Illustration beginning in 1855, at a time when the theatre in Britain had gained a poor reputation as an...