 The company has produced six of Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas. After the successful Iolanthe and The Mikado in 1962 and Patience in 1969, the last much revived in the UK, the U.S. and on the continent, a second production of The Mikado in 1986 starred the comedian Eric Idle in a black-and-white setting moved to a 1920s English seaside hotel. It has been regularly revived over 25 years. A 1992 production of Princess Ida directed by Ken Russell was a critical and box office disaster, ran briefly, and was not revived. The Pirates of Penzance was produced in 2005. A highly coloured production of The Gondoliers opened in 2006; the press pointed out that the company's diction had declined to the point that the recently introduced surtitles were essential. In 2015 the film director Mike Leigh directed a new production of The Pirates of Penzance; the critical consensus was disappointment that Leigh had chosen one of the weaker operas in the Savoy canon, but the show provided a box-office hit. The cinema live broadcast of the production broke all previous box-office records for UK opera cinema-event releases.
