About us

Established in 1903

HLO Musical Company has been around since 1903, which makes us one of the longest-established amateur theatre companies in west London.

Gilbert, Sullivan, Porter & Schwartz

We are mainly known as a Gilbert and Sullivan company, performing award-winning productions of the well-loved comic operas, but we put on non-G&S shows as well. In the Company’s early years other comic operas – mostly now lost in the mists of obscurity –  were produced, including Les Cloches de Corneville (about a French miser), Tom Jones (an operetta by Edward German, the composer widely regarded as Sullivan’s successor, based on the 17th century novel of the same name), The Rebel Maid (the adventures of an aristocratic supporter of William of Orange in the 15th century) and Merrie England, another Edward German piece last performed by HLO as a concert in 1994.

More recently we’ve varied the G&S with Broadway/West End musicals. In October 2015 we presented the UK premiere of The Pirate Queen, from the same people who brought you Les Miserables and Miss Saigon: Alain Boublil and Claude-Michel Schonberg. In March 2016 we performed Godspell which, until Wicked came along, was Stephen Schwartz’s best-known musical. We’ve also taken on Little Shop of Horrors, The Pajama Game, Cole Porter’s Anything Goes (twice) and another Stephen Schwartz show, The Baker’s Wife.

Godspell, 2016

Concerts, revues and plays

The Zoo, 2018

Our Spring concerts range from semi-staged versions of full-length shows to more traditional collections of chorus numbers and solos arranged around a theme. More recently we have been developing the concerts into revues including dance numbers and fully-staged versions of shorter shows, including Gilbert and Sullivan’s Trial By Jury and an extremely rare Sullivan one-act operetta, The Zoo.

We sometimes put on plays, usually comedy and farce. The first play, in 1907, was a farce called The Arabian Nights by Sydney Grundy. The Liars by Henry Arthur Jones was performed in 1925, and Emlyn Williams’s A Murder Has Been Arranged in 1935. More recent plays have included Oscar Wilde’s The Importance of Being Earnest, Peter Shaffer’s Black Comedy, stage adaptations of Terry Pratchett’s novels Mort and Maskerade, and the Ray Cooney farces It Runs In The Family and Move Over Mrs Markham.