About the work
L'île de Tulipatan is a one-act opéra bouffe by Jacques Offenbach with a libretto by Henri Chivot and Alfred Duru. It premiered on 30 September 1868 at the Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens in Paris.
Plot
On an invented island, two children grow up with swapped gender roles: Alexis, the ruler's son, is raised as a princess, while Hermosa, raised as a girl, is secretly a boy. When the two fall in love, their parents, each aware of only half the truth, must abandon their objections; once the couple reveal the truth to each other, they marry, with Alexis afterward going by the name "Alexandra" to satisfy social convention.
Cultural significance
With its double role reversal, the piece addresses cross-dressing and same-sex attraction unusually openly for its time, and recent scholarship cites it as an early example of musical theatre playfully unsettling gender roles. The Paris company Les Brigands revived it in 2012 in a double bill with Croquefer, and 2017 brought its first English-language recording, by the Light Opera of New York.