Word: katisha
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...exercise in futility to try to summarize a Gilbert and Sullivan plot, but the bare bones may suffice. Our young hero, Nanki-Poo (Jerry B. Shuman '98), the son of the Mikado of all Japan, has fled his father's court in the face of his upcoming nuptials to Katisha (Tuesday Rupp), a ferocious elderly noblewoman. While disguised as a wandering minstrel, Nanki-Poo has met and fallen in love with the delicious Yum-Yum (Caline Yamakawa)--but their amours were frustrated by the fact that the tailor Ko-Ko (Paul D. Siemens '98), the guardian...
...show's finest performances, though, is arguably not comic at all: Katisha, the ferocious would-be bride of Nanki-Poo, is played with both delicious villainy and a surprisingly subtle range of emotions by Tuesday Rupp. Bloodthirsty and terrified of her own encroaching old age, Katisha first appears in a cloud of smoke and an attitude that brings to mind Cruella de Ville. But, playing Gilbert and Sullivan's somewhat enigmatic character to the hilt, Rupp injects a disturbing and note of tragedy into the entire latter half of the play; in the complex weave of The Mikado, this cast...
...Broadway. Musically, they will deplore the conversion of W.S. Gilbert's candybox-pretty score into swing, jazz and gospel arrangements that bounce like the 1940s. Lyrically, they will ask themselves which is worse, rewriting some of Arthur Sullivan's urbane verse (one big laugh comes when Katisha, a scorned lady of the court played as a black street diva by Loretta Devine, screeches, "You piss me off!") or rendering much of what is left all but unintelligible through vocal pyrotechnics and general high spirits from a decidedly multicultural cast...
...brief appearance is made by Kathyrn Vaughan as Katisha, the delightfully evil would-be lover of Nanki-Poo. Her singing is weak in the upper register, but she more than makes up for it with her humorously overdone swooping, cackling and hissing...