Every year the Lamplighters Music Theatre of San Francisco lights up the holidays with its annual fund-raising champagne gala. This year, the international award-winning operetta company presents The Ballad of Buttercup Gap or The Good, The Bad, and the Silly! at the Lindland Theatre, Dec. 13-15.

In this revival of Lamplighter's 1989 original musical spoof on old fashioned melodramas, the orphan Rose Maybud is in search of the lost gold mine of Buttercup Gap, and encounters an assortment of vibrant characters from the Barbary Coast of the 1880's on her journey.

Each year original gala productions are performed by the company to music by Arthur S. Sullivan. The reason for the revival is due in part to the fact that many Lamplighter fans missed "one of the company's most ingenious galas" because of the Loma Prieta earthquake.

The theme of last year's gala production was cyberspace, in a revue titled She Virtually Loves Me.

For more information, please refer to the regional listing for theLamplighters Music Theatre. --By Blair Glaser