The Gilbert & Sullivan Opera Company’s performance of Patience drew a sizable crowd to Mandell Hall at the University of Chicago on Sunday (including us), as did previous Gilbert & Sullivan productions that we saw, Yeomen of the Guard and Iolanthe.

For good reason. The company, directed by Shane Valenzi, did a fine job of it, their talent augmented by the skillful University of Chicago Chamber Orchestra, a 40-member ensemble.

Remarkable how something funny almost 140 years ago can still be funny. Not only that, spot-on satirical. Then again, while the aesthetic poetry movement might be a thing of the increasingly distant past, fads — and more particularly, the fickle adulation of male sex symbols — are still immediately recognizable.

All of the leads, including Jeffrey Luksik as Bunthorne and Olivia Doig as Patience, brought considerable talent to their parts, but I was especially amused by Brandon Sokol’s take on Grosvenor. As the program notes put it, “Grosvenor is Fabio, a pure sex symbol without anything resembling artistic sensibilities,” and Sokol played it up delightfully.

Also amusing was Grosvenor’s transformation into “appearance and costume absolutely commonplace.” He came out with his golden hair shortened and wearing sports apparel, namely a Cubs cap and a Bears t-shirt. That was part of the costuming of the entire production, overseen by costume designer Rachel Sypniewski. The costumes were decidedly not Victorian, but that design decision worked.

“We’ve attempted to draw that comparison [between Victorian and modern faddishness] more or less overtly,” the program says, “modernizing the dress of the women and the poets to reflect a Poe-ish aesthetic evocative of the vampire-esque gothic movement that evolved from aestheticism and [which] enjoyed a revival during the popularity of the Twilight saga… The men [Dragoons] are Canadian Mounties who, despite their fearsome competence and justifiable pride, and nonetheless often the subject of light ridicule in American popular culture.”

(Such as Dudley Do-Right. Something I didn’t know about the Mounties, per Wiki: “Although the RCMP is a civilian police force, in 1921, following the service of many of its members during the First World War, King George V awarded the force the status of a regiment of dragoons, entitling it to display the battle honours it had been awarded.”)

Three of the Dragoons, usually dressed as Mounties, got the biggest laugh of the night when they tried to be aesthetics, dressed in tights. Actually, the very biggest laugh came when one of their members, the Duke of Dunstable, played by an enormous, hairy actor named Dennis Kulap, came out in pink tights.

One more thing about Patience, which I discovered just today: Oscar Brand and Joni Mitchell singing “Prithee Pretty Maiden.”