From 1959 to 1979, Mr. Reed was the principal comedian of the DOyly Carte Opera Company, the London professional troupe founded in the 1870s to stage the operettas of Gilbert and Sullivan. With the company, he appeared often in the United States and around the world; in the 1980s he was a frequent guest star with the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players.
The DOyly Carte folded in 1982; though it later had a sputtering revival, it now appears dormant. Mr. Reed, whose work is preserved on its recordings from the 1960s and 70s, was widely seen as the last significant link to the company in its Victorian-tinged glory days.
A butchers son from the north of England, Mr. Reed was a largely self-taught stage performer who fell into Gilbert and Sullivan by chance. He did not have a trained operatic voice and, in many interviews over the years, was the first to admit it. His light baritone was, fittingly, reedy and could sometimes fail him in the upper registers.
But for a generation of fans, Mr. Reed was the memorable embodiment of Gilbert and Sullivan's little man roles, among them John Wellington Wells, the title character of The Sorcerer; Major-General Stanley, the very model of et cetera from The Pirates of Penzance; Ko-Ko, the nebbish turned lord high executioner in The Mikado, a part he also played in the 1967 film version.
Mr. Reed was only the fifth man to inhabit those roles regularly for the DOyly Carte, following the company's celebrated comics George Grossmith, Henry Lytton, Martyn Green and Peter Pratt. Critics worldwide praised him for his bell-clear diction; dry, sophisticated humor; and nuanced portrayals of characters originally written as outsize satires.
Among the attributes that equipped Mr. Reed spectacularly well for the job were an elfin physique, fleetness of foot (he had been a prize-winning ballroom dancer as a young man) and, perhaps most important, the elocution lessons he had taken in his youth, which let him sail through the rapid-fire patter songs that are the hallmarks of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic baritone roles.
It is easy to fall in dactylic defeat when the words you confront from The Sorcerer here are a clatter of syllables jostling for space, borne by music that sends the text hurtling along at a speed that will leave you no time to draw breath:
Barring tautology,
In demonology,
Lectro-biology,
Mystic nosology,
Spirit philology,
High-class astrology,
Such is his knowledge, he
Isn't the man to require an apology!
John Reed was born on Feb. 13, 1916, near Bishop Auckland, in northeast England. As a young man, he worked in an insurance office, among other jobs; during World War II, he was a tool fitter.
After the war, Mr. Reed performed straight plays with a local repertory troupe. One day in the early 1950s, a friend told him of an opening at the DOyly Carte.
Mr. Reed had little familiarity with Gilbert and Sullivan, an almost treasonous stance for a Briton. But his elocution served him well. He was hired in 1951 as a chorister and understudy to Mr. Pratt; in 1959, on Mr. Pratt's retirement, he assumed the principal roles.
