Schmidseder. Operetta in English Offenbach's influence reached England by the 1860s. Arthur Sullivan, of the Gilbert and Sullivan duo, composed Cox and Box (1866) as a direct reaction to Offenbach's Les deux aveugles (1855). Gilbert and Sullivan solidified the format in England with their long-running collaboration during the Victorian era. With W. S. Gilbert writing the libretti and Sullivan composing the music, the pair produced 14 comic operas, which were later called Savoy Operas. Most were enormously popular in Britain, the U.S., and elsewhere. Gilbert, Sullivan, and their producer Richard D'Oyly Carte themselves call their joint works comic operas to distinguish this family-friendly fare from the risqué French operettas of the 1850s and 1860s. Their works, such as H.M.S. Pinafore, The Pirates of Penzance and The Mikado, continue to enjoy regular performances throughout the English-speaking world. While many of these operas seem to be very light-hearted, works such as the Mikado were making political commentaries on the British government and military with one of the main topics being capital punishment which was still widely used at the time. English operetta continued into the 1890s, with works by composers such as Edward German, Ivan Caryll and Sidney Jones. These quickly evolved into the lighter song-and-dance pieces known as Edwardian musical comedy. Beginning in 1907, with The Merry Widow, many of the Viennese operettas were adapted very successfully for the English stage. To explain this phenomenon, Derek Scott writes,In January 1908, London’s Daily Mail claimed that The Merry Widow had been performed 450 times in Vienna, 400 times in Berlin, 350 times in St Petersburg, 300 times in Copenhagen, and was currently playing every evening in Europe in nine languages. In the USA, five companies were presenting it, and "the rush for tickets at the New Amsterdam Theatre" was likened to "the feverish crowding round the doors of a threatened bank". Stan Czech, in his Lehár biography, claims that by 1910 it had been performed "around 18,000 times in ten languages on 154 American, 142 German, and 135 British stages".The international embrace of operetta directly correlated with the development of both the West End in London and Broadway in New York. American audiences were first introduced to operetta through Gilbert and Sullivan's H.M.S. Pinafore in 1878. American operetta composers included Victor Herbert, whose works at the beginning of the 20th century were influenced by both Viennese operetta and Gilbert and Sullivan. He