Word: nanki
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...seems like an exercise in futility to try to summarize a Gilbert and Sullivan plot, but the bare bones may suffice. Our young hero, Nanki-Poo (Jerry B. Shuman '98), the son of the Mikado of all Japan, has fled his father's court in the face of his upcoming nuptials to Katisha (Tuesday Rupp), a ferocious elderly noblewoman. While disguised as a wandering minstrel, Nanki-Poo has met and fallen in love with the delicious Yum-Yum (Caline Yamakawa)--but their amours were frustrated by the fact that the tailor Ko-Ko (Paul D. Siemens '98), the guardian...
...this production might easily have been allowed to ride on the abilities of a few, letting mediocrity slide by around the edges. Fortunately, that isn't an issue here; each of the central players demonstrate a startlingly high level of energy. As the young romantic protagonists Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo, Yamakawa and Shuman are thoroughly engaging, projecting the strange blend of world-wisdom and innocence that make Gilbert and Sullivan's heroes so appealing--by the time he's finished his introductory song, "A Wandering Minstrel I," Shuman has won us over. Siemens's Ko-Ko is thoroughly annoying...
...that of executioner. Managing to make one of Gilbert and Sullivan's most enduring and well-known characters unusually likable, Mills retains the character's indispensable stuffiness: "I can trace my ancestry back to a protoplasmic primordial atomic globule," Pooh-Bah sniffs genially, as he explains his haughtiness to Nanki-Poo and the audience. "Consequently, my family pride is something inconceivable...
...show's finest performances, though, is arguably not comic at all: Katisha, the ferocious would-be bride of Nanki-Poo, is played with both delicious villainy and a surprisingly subtle range of emotions by Tuesday Rupp. Bloodthirsty and terrified of her own encroaching old age, Katisha first appears in a cloud of smoke and an attitude that brings to mind Cruella de Ville. But, playing Gilbert and Sullivan's somewhat enigmatic character to the hilt, Rupp injects a disturbing and note of tragedy into the entire latter half of the play; in the complex weave of The Mikado, this cast...
...Nanki-Poo but does not cut loose vocally as he did in Into the Woods, this is an amazing turnaround for Bell and Bowman, who mounted Broadway's truly brainless if brief musical flop, the gender-swapping castle fantasy A Change in the Heir, in 1990. Where that air was stale, this is irrepressibly fresh and fizzy...