It’s hilarity on the high seas as the Bay Area’s acclaimed Lamplighters Music Theatre performs Gilbert and Sullivan’s “H.M.S. Pinafore” at the Napa Valley Opera House this weekend.

Lamplighters’ artistic Director Barbara Heroux directs this fully staged production featuring a live orchestra and the Lamplighters company, with guest conductor George Thomson at the baton.

Gilbert and Sullivan’s classic comic operetta, with its mockery of incompetence in high political places, is as timely as today’s headlines.

This send-up of snobbery and social class sets sail with a lowly seaman in love with his captain’s daughter, who is pledged by her father to a higher-ranking officer. Mayhem prevails in this ship-shape satire chock full of Gilbert and Sullivan’s trademark twists and turns — but so does true love.

“H.M.S. Pinafore” was Gilbert and Sullivan’s fourth operatic collaboration, and became the duo’s first big hit, opening at the Opera Comique in London on May 25, 1878. Running for 571 performances, the second longest run of any musical theater piece at the time, “H.M.S. Pinafore” became a huge fad in England as well as America, and was copied illegally by dozens of performing companies.

Drawing on themes introduced in“The Sorcerer,” “H.M.S. Pinafore” poked fun at class snobbery, the Royal Navy, parliamentary politics and the rise of unqualified people to positions of authority.

“H.M.S. Pinafore”

Napa Valley Opera House

Saturday, Aug. 11, 8 p.m.

Sunday, Aug. 12, 2 p.m       

Tickets: $40/$35

Box Office 226-7372, www.nvoh.org