summer. From about 2015 the Festival has also given a week of mostly professional shows in Buxton shortly before its main opening in Harrogate. The Festival was not held in 2020, when Harrogate was hosting an NHS Nightingale Hospital during the Covid-19 pandemic. During the shutdown, the Festival launched an online streaming service that presents recorded performances from past Festivals and some live content. The Festival was also awarded a grant of £120,000 from the government Culture Recovery Fund. The Festival resumed annually in 2021. Until 2022, it continued to run for a week in Buxton and nearly two weeks in Harrogate. In 2023 the entire Festival is set to return to Buxton. Description Each summer, beginning with the last weekend in July or first weekend in August, the Festival includes two or three weeks of nightly G&S operas (and weekend matinees) and dozens of daytime fringe activities, The Festival has sold more than 25,000 tickets in some years and has attracted up to 2,000 performers. Sky Arts described the Festival as "one of the most colourful, melodic and joyous festivals of musical theatre you will come across. Celebrating the timeless, waspishly satirical lyrics of W. S. Gilbert and the brilliant musical inventiveness of Arthur Sullivan, the festival is quite simply the world’s biggest event dedicated to the Savoy operas. ... It is forward-looking and fun presenting contemporary as well as traditional productions of G&S." The Festival's professional orchestra accompanies the main stage performances. The competition The Festival began as mostly a competition among amateur G&S performing troupes from Britain and around the world, with up to a dozen or so amateur performances. On the weeknights during each Festival, "the best non-professional groups from the UK and overseas compete for the International Champions title." Some groups perform year after year at the Festival, but some companies, especially those travelling from North America, South Africa, Australia and other distant places, may visit only occasionally or once. Others meet and rehearse entirely at the Festival. The day of performance for each amateur group is hectic, with move-in to the theatre at 9 a.m., lighting call at 11 a.m., the one and only tech-dress rehearsal (with the Festival orchestra) in the afternoon, the performance in the evening, and move-out immediately afterwards. A professional adjudicator critiqued each amateur performance immediately after the curtain fell. The adjudicator then scored each performance, and both group and