Old lawyers don’t die, they just go to productions of one act plays dealing with trials. Just like small claims court, if you don’t like the first trial, it’s almost time for the second. I figured I could tolerate anything for 45 minutes, although I’ve never experienced waterboarding.

The Devil and Daniel Webster came first. Scratch carries a black box (which looks a lot like the ones I use to hide my cables) that contains a lost soul in the form of a moth that cries out for help, much in the way that David Hedison did in The Fly before he had his head crushed in a mechanical press.

The moth’s existence does not end well either, but, of course, Daniel Webster’s eloquent closing statement convinces a group of damned souls to find for the defendant Jabez Stone despite his written contract with Scratch, and save his soul, in perhaps the greatest example of jury nullification in literature.

The oral contract being contested in Gilbert & Sullivan’s Trial By Jury deals with a promise to marry, so, once again, a man’s soul is at stake.

There’s no dialogue in Trial by Jury, which caused the audience to be unsure about applauding after each song because the music kept going and the audience didn’t want to applaud over the start of the next song, which was always seconds away, or maybe they, like me, just didn’t want the show to run long.

It occurred to me that I’d never actually sat through a Gilbert & Sullivan show before, and likely never will again, the closest thing being the two times I’ve seen Hot Mikado. As with that show, perhaps if here they had jazzed up the songs and added some tap dancing, I would have ruled in favor of the production.