Word: mikado
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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Their solution to this problem--based on Gilbert's chance encounter with Japanese culture at a London exhibition--turns out to be The Mikado. And Mike Leigh's movie about mounting that best of all G. & S. works turns out to be one of the year's more beguiling surprises. It is not at all the sort of thing one expects from Leigh, the very sober creator of films like Naked and Secrets and Lies, for it is basically the story--somewhat comic, somewhat desperate, very carefully detailed--of rehearsing and putting on the operetta...
...When we start to relax, please don't send us a fax, for we're surging, with urging, for merging," they sang to the tune of "Tit-Willow" from The Mikado...
...Madame Butterfly, the story of an American naval officer, Benjamin Franklin (B.F.) Pinkerton, who abandons his Japanese wife, Cio-Cio San (Butterfly). The story, based on John Luther Longs novella, has been retold, again and again, in such productions as Broadways Miss Saigon and Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado. Most recently, BSO takes on a fully staged concert version of Puccini's opera at Symphony Hall, with the last and final performance this coming Saturday...
...this hemisphere. With Seven-Eleven, KFC and bowling around, who needs sleepy Chestnut Ridge, N.Y.? And as for Japanese culture in America, I certainly remember watching kabuki as child--on an episode of "Alvin and the Chipmunks." And who can forget the educating Gilbert and Sullivan production of "The Mikado" at Harvard this fall...
...quality and enthusiasm of the players and the staff add up, in the end, to one thoroughly satisfying show. Theater-goers should in fairness be warned that this uncut version of The Mikado runs close to three hours, longer than some people are willing to sit still. But those who don't make the effort will regret it; and those who do will find that, with rare exceptions, every moment of the show is worth it. In the hands of these skillful performers, The Mikado comes up as funny as it was a century ago, and looking rosier than ever