Alice Oates  Alice Oates (22 September 1849 – 10 January 1887) was an actress, theatre manager and pioneer of American musical theatre who took opéra bouffe in English to all corners of America. She produced the first performance of a work by Gilbert and Sullivan in America with her unauthorised "Trial by Jury" in 1875, the first American production of "The Sultan of Mocha" (1878) and an early performance of "H.M.S. Pinafore" (1878). Born as Alice Merritt in Nashville in Tennessee, she was educated at a Catholic seminary in Kentucky before studying singing in Louisville in Kentucky and New Orleans intending to follow a career in opera. Aged about 15 she married James A. Oates, the stage-manager at the Adelphi Theater in Nashville under Augusta Dargon, and made her first appearance on the stage in his benefit as Paul in "The Pet of the Petticoats". While still making occasional concert appearances under the name of ‘Mdlle Orsini’, she began working alongside her husband as a soubrette in shows in Nashville (1867), then in Cincinnati, Chicago and Saint Paul in Minnesota (where her husband took a theatre). As her confidence as a performer grew so her rôles became more important. She played Idex in "Undine", Fianetta in "The White Fawn", Darnley in "The Field of the Cloth of Gold" and Abdallah in "The Female Forty Thieves". She founded her ‘Mrs James A Oates’ Burlesque Troupe’ in 1868 and toured with it throughout 1869 with the burlesques "The Field of the Cloth of Gold", "Rip van Winkle" and "Pocahontas" around America and in May 1870 made her way to the Olympic Theatre in New York to play Broadway for the first time as Little Graceful in "The Fair One in the Golden Wig"; Josephine in a burlesque of the old musical drama "The Daughter of the Regiment, or the 800 Fathers" (in theory a version of Donizetti's opera "La fille du régiment" but actually including music from other composers including Offenbach and Verdi); and "The Field of the Cloth of Gold". She returned to the Olympic in August 1870 with her first attempt at opéra-bouffe, a seriously botched version of London's already pretty botched version of Hervé’s "Little Faust" (playing both Méphisto and the Street Arab) which met with little favour but which was probably the first American production of that work.