Haste to the Wedding is a three-act comic opera with words W. S. Gilbert and music by George Grossmith. It’s based on Gilbert's 1873 play, The Wedding March. The opera was produced at the Criterion Theatre in 1892. It did poorly, however it introduced the 18-year-old George Grossmith, Jr., the composer's son, to the London stage, who would go on to have a career on stage and in film. 

 

 

In 1873, Gilbert (writing as  F. Latour Tomline) producedThe Wedding March, which was performed with great success at the Court Theatre. It was a free adaptation of Eugène Marin Labiche's Un chapeau de paille d'Italie ("The Italian Straw Hat"). The name of the hero, Woodpecker Tapping, was taken from Thomas Moore's ballad, "The woodpecker tapping the hollow beech tree.” The “Haste to the Wedding” audience did not respond well to the adaptation, which changed the nature of the play from French style farce to Gilbert style opera. Grossmith’s style of music is witty and understated, which works well on most of the numbers.  

 

 

The University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society recorded the production in 1973, with just a few changes to the order. At Chichester (1975) and Exeter (1976), an adaptation was created using Gilbert's The Wedding March as a starting point, adding the lyrics and music from Haste to the Wedding, as well as additional original lyrics written to music adapted from Jacques Offenbach’s Barbe-Bleue, and material from The Mountebanks. This piece was called The Italian Straw Hat and played strongly for limited seasons. -Wikipedia. Leon Berger and Selwyn Tillett recorded two numbers from Haste to the Wedding on “A Society Clown”.

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Terry Hawes, who scored Gilbert’s play “His Excellency”, also wrote a version of The Italian Straw Hat in the 1970’s. He created an original score, and based his libretto on English translations, but also went back to the French versions to “find some more jokes”.