Word: mikado
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...important of the minor pleasures of life, and Harvard would be a spiritually poorer place without its G & S society. Like any company devoted to performing a canon of works over and over, some years it must forego the juiciest operas and stick with the second-rate. But The Mikado (even if it's not quite as good as Patience) is the traditional favorite, the old chestnut by which the rest are judged. Its production is like Hamlet at Stratford or Casablanca at the Brattle Square. This Mikado, though, is hardly a high point among recent G & S productions...
...lead in G & S operas are usually second in insipidity only to the straight female lead, and Fuller turned in one of the most successful recent performance in such a difficult, unrewarding role. Pooh-Bah (Scott Moe) was well performed, but not as satisfactory; like Peter Rogers's unfortunate Mikado and Crowley's otherwise fine Ko-Ko, his portrayal suffered from too much of an unctiousness that makes Gilbert and Sullivan seem like effete tomfoolery, overbred "veddy British" knockabout farce, instead of satirical light opera of the highest order...
...point of "See How the Fates Their Gifts Allot," perhaps the show's wittiest number. This was not the only bit of business that came off--the tableau effects during "The criminal cried" were excellent, and the ruffling and unruffling of large gold foil fans during "A More Humane Mikado" nearly stopped the show. And Katisha's new image as an angular, sympathetic giantess instead of a short, fat grouch worked well as one of the few departures from convention among the characterizations...
...That The Mikado sags in the middle, through the string of serious, lamenting numbers just before the finales begin, is only partly the fault of the cast, but they do very little to improve things. A production of The Mikado stands or falls by how it handles the run of brilliant songs that carry the denouement from "Here's a How-De-Do" onward. Musical director Jon Sheffer doesn't take full advantage of the grand orchestral flourishes that are meant to be milked for all they're worth. The chorus never lets go and brings the house down...
...this production won't gain Gilbert and Sullivan any new admirers, particularly since The Mikado's theme (almost alone among Gilbert's plots) deals with more than minor, absurd social issues of the Victorian age, such as cleaning up salty language (Pinafore), Walter Pater-style aestheticism (Patience), and the House of Lords (Iolanthe). The Mikado, like some of Shakespearian and Johnsonian comedy, is about the impossibility and immorality of repressing the passions. It is the play in which Gilbert moves farthest away from the Victorian center he usually represented and comes closest to criticizing society as well as ridiculing social...