Word: ko-ko
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...subject matter of The Mikado remains as pertinent today as a century ago. Crooked politicos and covert dealing abound. Ko-Ko (Steve Mooradian), sentenced to die for flirting, has managed to get himself promoted to the top of the criminal justice system--Lord High Executioner. All other functions of state fall under the aegis of the corrupt, sneering Pooh-Bah (Kenneth Bamberger). The regal Mikado (Anton Quist) makes certain that the "punishment fit the crime"--that ludicrous laws decapitate luckless lovers. Fortunately, palmgreasing and artful seduction prevent anyone from getting hurt...
That synchronization is broken when the male chorus comes scrambling on in identical blue business suits. All the flurry and the coy comic extravagance of having Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner (Baritone James Billings), carry on like an insurance salesman who has been crushed beneath his quarterly projections set a pace that the singers cannot match. Whatever purists may have thought were its vulgarizations and deficiencies, Joseph Papp's Broadway presentation of The Pirates ofPenzance was all of a brassy piece. This Mikado is too fitful, too ambitious, perhaps-Dare we even whisper it, risking...
...Oyly Carte tradition that Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, proscribe a modern villain or two in his first-act showstopper, I've Got a Little List. And sure enough, Baritone Alistair Donkin ticked off an added starter in his roll of "society offenders who might well be underground, and who never would be missed." Spinning impishly about the stage in much the same gyrations that the great Martyn Green had learned from Sir Henry Lytton (inherited by Lytton from the original Ko-Ko, George Grossmith, who had learned his stage business from Director...
Alas, it was Ko-Ko himself who would be missed by sorrowful G&S fans in England and the U.S. (where the troupe made its first tour in 1879-80, for the premiere of Pirates of Penzance). Last week, after more than a century of continuous operation as a troupe, the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company gave its last performance and disbanded. In the end there were not enough Savoyard loyalists to pay the costs of a 100-member company. The Arts Council of Great Britain, hard pressed to subsidize the National Theater...
...where he was once dean of the College of Arts and Sciences and is now a professor of economics, Alfred Kahn, 63, has polished up his act. A robust bass, he regularly turns up in local Gilbert and Sullivan productions, playing the modern Major General in Pirates of Penzance, Ko-ko in The Mikado and Jack Point in Yeoman of the Guards. Asked to aid a local fund raiser, Kahn happily swapped his tweedy academic threads for the lounge-lizard's black tie. "It was more a benefit for me," says he. "I'd give...