Iolanthe

In this gloriously anarchic comic opera, a half-fairy son with human legs from the waist down decides the best way to win his true love is to enter British Parliament. The catch: every member of the House of Lords is also competing for the same woman, including the Lord High Chancellor himself. Meanwhile, his mother Iolanthe, banished to the mortal world for the crime of marrying a human, rallies her fairy sisters to help -- though none of them have any idea how politics actually work. The result is a riotous send-up of hereditary privilege, where fairies who've never held a job attempt to reform the peerage through competitive examination. Gilbert's razor-sharp wit skewers the British class system with such gleeful absurdity that it remains impossibly fresh over a century later. The jokes come fast, the social commentary cuts deep, and the whole thing bubbles with the kind of sophisticated silliness that only Gilbert and Sullivan could pull off.