Word: mikados
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...Mikado. The production lacks exuberance, but it's still solid Gilbert and Sullivan and that should help just about anyone's term-paper blues. At the Agassiz (a wonderful theater, incidentally, with good acoustics and a sense of intimacy unique among Harvard's auditoria, even if it is structurally unsound), tonight, tomorrow...
...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...
...technical activities at the highest level of proficiency in order to keep G & S worth seeing again and again. This means taking Gilbert and Sullivan more seriously, as if they really were worth spending a lot of time and energy thinking about and producing. This production of The Mikado seems vaguely ashamed of itself; its hesitance is the product of defensiveness. Director Lindsay Davis contents himself with drabness in order to escape being accused of outrageousness or extravagance; the cast camps in order to escape being accused of taking itself too seriously. If only they relaxed and went overboard once...