Gilbert and Sullivan well, and on 13 May 1883, at a party to celebrate the composer's 41st birthday, the guests, including the Prince of Wales (later Edward VII), heard a direct relay of parts of "Iolanthe" from the Savoy. This was probably the first live "broadcast" of an opera. During the run of "Iolanthe", in 1883, Sullivan was knighted by Queen Victoria. Although it was the operas with Gilbert that had earned him the broadest fame, the honour was conferred for his services to serious music. The musical establishment, and many critics, believed that this should put an end to his career as
New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players the genre, while others, like Hal Linden in 2008, fared well. NYGASP averaged four productions a year at Symphony Space during the 1980s and 1990s, each playing for about a week. In 1985, the orchestra was unionized, and in 1989 the company entered into an agreement with the Actors' Equity union. The company's repertoire expanded throughout the 1980s, and it gradually produced all of the extant Gilbert and Sullivan operas. There was also a short-lived attempt in 1989 to broaden the company's repertory beyond G&S, when it presented Gershwin's Pulitzer Prize-winning musical "Of Thee I Sing". But the experiment proved