When a show coming up at Lydia Mendelssohn Theatre employs a love potion and pokes fun at the foibles of the upper crust, chances are good it’s a Gilbert and Sullivan comic operetta, and that the University of Michigan Gilbert and Sullivan Society is involved.

UMGASS will present “The Sorcerer” Thursday-Sunday. Mitchell Gillett directs; Yaniv Segal is music director.

“The Sorcerer” was the third G&S collaboration. Although not that well known, the work introduces many devices that would later become staples of Gilbert and Sullivan’s more popular offerings.

“It’s got everything they would build on for the bigger shows, but in miniature,” Gillett explained. “You can see shadows of stuff that pops up in ‘Pirates’ and ‘Pinafore’ and ‘Iolanthe.’ … So it’s the one that tends to fall by the wayside because it’s not the funniest one, but they were getting their legs, finding how to write the shows they eventually made famous.”

“The Sorcerer” is based on the Christmas story “An Elixir of Love,” which Gilbert wrote for a magazine. A young man, Alexis (played by Jeff Wilkinson), obsessed with idea of love leveling all ranks and social distinctions, asks the proprietor of J. W. Wells & Co., Family Sorcerers (G&S favorite David Andrews plays John Wellington Wells), to brew a love potion. The concoction causes everyone in the village to fall in love with the first person they see and results in the pairing of comically mismatched couples.

Besides Andrews and Wilkinson, the cast includes Rachel McIntosh (Lady Sangazure), Matt Peckham (Dr. Daly), Jesse Murillo (Sir Marmaduke Pointdextre), Diana Herstein (Mrs. Partlet), Alexandra Khan (Constance), Sara Zeglevski (Aline) and Jeremy Williams (the notary).

“We had some new people, and on occasion we had to go out and seek some people,” Gillett said. “Principal-wise, I was very lucky I had some very good quality comic people, particularly in David Andrews. My Dr. Daly has a nice feel for how he’s doing the vicar of the village and Diana Herstein as Mrs. Partlet has a lot of very good comedy that she brings to the role.

“One other thing I tried to adhere to is Gilbert tries to show the differences in the various ranks of people by the accents they have,” Gillett added. “So the chorus, when they awake in the second act, are doing their stuff in what’s called a mummerset (an invented English language dialect used by actors that mimics a stereotypical English Westcountry accent). Mrs. Partlet and her daughter have that to begin with. The lower class people are much more distinguished from the middle class and upper class with their BBC English.”

Gillett is well known on the Ann Arbor stage scene and no novice to the world of G&S. He has directed several shows for UMGASS, starting in 1993, as well as for Ann Arbor Civic Theatre and the Comic Opera Guild. By day he works at Kellogg Eye Center (“I do research for researchers,” he said).

Anyone familiar with “The Sorcerer” should note a slight update: UMGASS has set the show in the 1920s. “Because we’ve put the action forward, it means we get to spice up the dancing a little bit. And for purists, it’s still in a period where you have the inequity of rank, it was the last hurrah before dukes end up marrying chorus girls all the time. All that was swept away later on by the Second World War,” Gillett said.

“We’re doing ‘20s costumes, trying to give it more of that feel and not the traditional (look of) everybody hold hands at length looking like an 1870s operetta. It gives it a slightly more natural feel,” he added.

If there’s one drawback to “The Sorcerer,” it’s the lack of recognizable songs — other than perhaps the patter song “My name is John Wellington Wells” and “Incantation,” which appeared in the 1999 film “Topsy-Turvy” — in the score, Gillett said.

“It doesn’t have as many well-known numbers … they are very good, they just don’t have the spark of something you would see in ‘Pirates’ or ‘Mikado,’” he said.

Still, that’s no reason to sit this one out.

“More than anything, it’s a little gem of a show,” Gillett said of “The Sorcerer.” “When I first saw this, I thought ‘Why isn’t this done more often?’”

Roger LeLievre is a freelance writer who covers music for AnnArbor.com.