Word: katisha
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...Boys good-by at about the eighth bar of the first song, turns Titipu into a dance hall before latecomers are in their seats, makes Yum-Yum, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo carry on like three little maids from reform school, and finishes Act I in an uproar when Katisha busts in, no hatchet-faced termagant, but an eye-rolling, hip-shaking, torch-singing Red Hot Mama...
...where her father was a music teacher. At five she performed as Cupid in a church pageant, made her audience laugh by falling off a pedestal. At 14, under her stage name (borrowed from an aunt) she joined an itinerant stock opera troupe, finally got a chance to understudy Katisha in The Mikado for $8 a week. Eight years later, playing in the same theatre, she was getting $800 a week...
...best ingenue parts in the Savoy Operas. Gilbert, in a particularly happy mood, made them two pert, attractive little baggages with minds of their own. Tessa and Gianetta steer a refreshing course, avoiding the Victorian doldrums (insipid Mabel, elfish Yum-Yum) and the Gilbertian caricatures (whining Ruth, tasteless Katisha). "When a Merry Maiden Marries" comes off with admirable airiness and grace, and so does the romping fantasy, "'Tis a glorious thing, I ween, to be a Regular Royal Queen." The right note of plaintiveness without nagging is reached in Tessa and Gianetta's advice to their departing husbands...
...soprano roles in Gilbert & Sullivan operettas are most effective when sung by small, arch, comely ladies. The contralto roles demand singers made up to look stout and ugly. Katisha in The Mikado, in particular, should be "a most unattractive old thing, tra la, with a caricature of a face." For this role last week the brothers Lee & Jake Shubert signed up oldtime Contralto Ernestine Schumann-Heink, 70. With a company of seasoned Savoyards, the Shuberts' Mikado opens Oct. 16 in Wilmington, Del., will play in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia and other Eastern cities...
...with The Mikado in Boston's Lyric Theatre. They threatened to head off the Aborn troupe wherever it should go. But after two weeks the Shubert Mikado, lacking patronage, ceased and desisted. The Shuberts had planned other Gilbert & Sullivan works but their troupe, now fortified with a Teutonic Katisha, will now stick to The Mikado...