Opera Review: A more correct Mikado

The Mikado

Music by Arthur Sullivan

Words by W.S. Gilbert

New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players

Kaye Playhouse, Hunter College NYC

January 4, 2020

The New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players has been carrying the G&S torch for forty or so years now, beginning as a volunteer community group, and now staging professional productions, but still with a bit of charming amateurism that connects it to the grand tradition of bad worldwide productions of these progenitors of twentieth century musical theater. The thing is, G&S produce quite sophisticated music and words, requiring fine performers to negotiate properly, and this company seems to do that in spades, with excellent selection of principal roles, and a good, if smaller than desirable orchestra. They don’t spend much on sets, and this production of The Mikado (1885) in the Kaye Playhouse had too small a stage to allow much real choreography that often enlivens these operettas. Luckily, they do follow the tradition of updating the political patter songs...I correctly predicted that in "I've Got A Little List" there would be a rhyme regarding our president involving the words "list" and "narcissist". But overall, when I see G&S, the real test is whether I emerge bouncy and with earworms galore (this time: “A More Humane Mikado” and A Wand’ring Minstrel, I”) that torment me for days. This production succeeded on both counts.

Coming from a NYC organization that seems deeply conservative in its preservation of G&S, this production represented a bit of a departure from form. A few years ago the company leadership met with representatives of the Asian community that were concerned about The Mikado’s perpetuation of stereotypes. The company took this to heart. The current production borrows heavily in its inspiration from the superb 1999 Mike Leigh movie Topsy Turvy that shows the entire process of making the first performance of the operetta, from Gilbert’s inspiration at a Japanese exhibition in London to the nuts and bolts of dramatic and vocal coaching. See this movie—it is one of the best I know about the process of creating art. The conceit of the NYC production is that Gilbert, seeking a new operetta topic, sees bits of Japanese fabric and swords and has a real or day-dream devising the new operetta, with very incomplete information about exactly how an authentic Japanese set should really look. In this production Gilbert and Sullivan are both portrayed on stage, and also appear 1-2 times during the show, giving this production a postmodern feel. You see, we are not actually seeing The Mikado, but an internal monologue in Gilbert’s brain about what will become The Mikado. It is an interesting idea that allows the performance to proceed with a multiracial cast not in the least made up as Asian, rather appearing as a bunch of appealing Brits at a rehearsal for The Mikado, but not yet fully made up and attired. This is not so far from what G&S intended, I think. The Pirates of Penzance is not a historically accurate depiction of pirate customs, nor is The Mikado an exercise in scientific anthropology. G&S operettas are at heart silly, funny affairs used to poke fun at late 19^th century England, in the grand tradition of Gulliver’s Travels. That aim was achieved here as well. Perhaps best for the company, this solution also avoids the arguments about older art stereotyping minorities that has plagued everything from Othello to Madama Butterfly, while still allowing the performance of one of the G&S masterworks.

But I think this show’s producers could have gone even farther with this idea. The cast was made up in very odd-appearing British upper class attire, but each member with a garish “Japanese” hat, sash, or apron, all rather tastefully inauthentic and ugly. Sometimes these additions were hard to really appreciate, consisting of an exotic fabric type that blended into conventional attire (below). These odd costumes are not something that the worldly Gilbert would really have dreamed up, I think, even before he saw the fully authentic Japanese expo in London. So throughout the production I was more distracted than intrigued by the odd costumes, wishing they were either yet more outrageously inappropriate (full drag might have been fun) or not used at all.  

The production was a series of similar compromises. The stage actions and limited choreography was uber-traditional. Does rope-pulling have to accompany every single rendition of Nanki-Poo’s “A Wand’ring Minstrel I” when the song moves into its sea chanty section? The performers had classic G&S voices…Yum-Yum with a narrow vibrato soprano, Nanki-Poo with a slightly nasal tenor (a bit too taxed up high when asked to sing loudly), all of which was comfortable and familiar. I wonder when some director will try to shake things up by altering vocal types or ranges, perhaps gender, as is all the rage now? I recall a televised Pirates done as a gay fantasy with preening sailors—so perhaps this sort of thing is being done with G&S, but not yet by this company. I think G&S’s works are sufficiently brilliant so that, like all the major operas, they would benefit from some creative attention beyond what the conservative presenters did here.

But there is a role for preservation, and as long as we get to still hear these extended, brilliantly rhymed, pre-Sondheim couplets, I’m happy to see a well-done G&S production, even if it’s not cutting edge:

Taken from the county jail

By a set of curious chances;

Liberated then on bail

On my own recognizánces.

Wafted by a favouring gale

As one sometimes sees in trances,

To a height that few can scale,

Save, by long and weary dances;

Surely, never had a male

Under such like circumstances

So adventurous a tale,

Which may rank by most romances.