Scott Cantrell

RICHARDSON – The delightful doggerel and toe-tapping tunes of the Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are all but singer-proof. And they're time-honored fare for community opera companies like the Living Opera, which opened a short run of H.M.S. Pinafore Thursday evening.

Actually, the Richardson-based company has a fine bunch of singers. Justin Lott's Ralph Rackstraw and Blake Davidson's Bill Bobstay are standouts, with particularly powerful and well-formed voices. Rounding out the cast are Joseph Rinaldi (Sir Joseph Porter), Kyle Hancock (Captain Corcoran), Jacquelyn Lengfelder (Josephine), Brooke Clark Gibson (Buttercup) and Brandon Gibson (Dick Deadeye). Even the tiny chorus of sailors makes a jolly noise, although the young women portraying Sir Joseph's "sisters and his cousins and his aunts" want more heft and less chirp. The chorus master is Grady Coyle.

Presenting the work with a much-reduced orchestration is understandable, but a saxophone is an odd intrusion in this particular nine-instruments version. The players are thoroughly professional, and conductor Gregory Sullivan Issacs mostly kept things together on opening night. But both voices and instruments could use more careful balancing.

Victoria Fisher's simple ship's-deck set works well enough. But Robert Harper's staging is far too busy, with people ever prancing or dancing or running around. And he allows, or encourages, Ms. Gibson to overact shamelessly.

Ms. Lengfelder adds a preposterously long and florid cadenza to Josephine's "The hours creep on apace." It's said to be a parody of operatic excess, and it got guffaws in the Eisemann Center's Countrywide Theatre, but it doesn't belong.

And what are presumably attempts at British accents yield vowel distortions to be heard in no English shire. Mr. Lott seems to have modeled his English on Luciano Pavarotti's. Better not even to try.

No, this isn't Wagner, but G&S is good enough to be treated with a little restraint. The most important person in any opera company, great or small, is the one who can say "No."

PLAN YOUR LIFE Repeats at 7:30 tonight and 2 p.m. Saturday at the Eisemann Center, 2351 Performance Drive, Richardson. $20 to $50; discounts for students, seniors. 972-744-4650, www.thelivingopera.org.