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High spirits
The Mikado is a delightful trifle
BY BILL RODRIGUEZ


Sure, there are the beaches, but they don’t make you laugh. One of the most dependable delights of South County in the summer is the annual production of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta, layered like a delectable English trifle by director David W. Price. There wasn’t one there last year, but now Courthouse Light Opera is staging The Mikado (through July 31 at the Courthouse Center for the Arts), and it doesn’t disappoint.

In 1885 the Japanese ambassador to Great Britain tried to have the first production stopped because the operetta insulted the emperor and the Japanese people, but the silly story isn’t any more racist than H.M.S. Pinafore is anti-military or The Gondoliers is anti-Venetian.

Librettist William S. Gilbert would have been a terror at a children’s birthday party, what with his penchant for bursting balloons. To let the hot air out, would be his defense, and the pompous were as irresistible to him as top hats are on gentlemen passing a snowball fight. (Pity poor self-impressed composer Arthur Sullivan, who was knighted shortly before they collaborated, after heated disputes, on The Mikado. Sullivan wanted them to write a lofty opera worthy of his status.)

Nothing could be more down-to-earth and sympathetic toward ordinary folk than this tale of Nanki-Poo (Glenn Matthew Zienowicz) and his luscious Yum-Yum (Lisa D. Calkins). He is the son of the emperor, who ordered him to marry an elderly woman, so he fled the court to wander the countryside as a minstrel — well, second trombone in a traveling band.

In the town of Titipu, he comes to propose to the fair maiden he fell in love with upon seeing her there a year before. Unfortunately, she is betrothed to Ko-Ko (Price). He is Lord High Executioner, appointed to that position after a reprieve, himself having been sentenced to execution for flirting. (In "I’ve Got a Little List," Ko-Ko enumerates the kinds of people who could do with a little lopping, including those with "flabby hands and irritating laughs" and "all third persons who on spoiling tete-e-tetes insist.")

Eventually boy gets girl and all’s right with the world, but they and the other main characters suffer nail-biting reversals before skipping toward their happy endings. One example is the requisite G&S pompous ass, the nobleman Poo-Bah, played with whimsical understatement and attentive timing by Gerry Maynard. Tracing his ancestry back "pre-protoplasm," Poo-Bah feels entitled to his numerous salaries and positions, from chief magistrate to chief of police, and is available to sell state secrets at reasonable rates. He declares that he was "born to sneer," so his eventual potential execution after he and Ko-Ko lie to the Mikado (Thomas Epstein) comes as a rude shock to him.

There are several entertaining songs here, none of which are the unaccountably familiar "Three Little Maids from School Are We." The more successful ones develop the characters, such as the braggart Ko-Ko with "The Criminal Cried As He Dropped Him Down" and "A More Humane Mikado," where a chipper Epstein has his charmingly bloodthirsty emperor relish making "Each evil liver/ A running river/ Of harmless merriment." Zienowicz gets to exercise his resonant trained voice in such ditties as "If You Want to Know Who We Are" and "A Wand’ring Minstrel I." The nobleman Pish-Tush (Neil Bangs) leads the village men in singing "Our Great Mikado, Virtuous Man," celebrating the wisdom of beheading men for a wink or a leer.

Price customarily steals the show, and does so here with such antics as playing air axe like a strutting Mick Jagger and whimpering like C3PO when he faces doom. Others offer hearty competition, such as Diane R. Petit as Katisha. She is the older woman to whom Nanki-Poo is betrothed, blood-red from dress to claw-like fingernails. Petit gives Wicked Witch of the West oomph as well as good voice to "There Is Beauty In the Bellow of the Blast," joining Price in a vocal pas de deux celebrating his reluctantly romancing her. As Pitti-Sing, Holly Van Allen stands out as the maiden eager to conspire with Ko-Ko and Poo-Bah to hoodwink the emperor, adding a mischievous female presence with them in three consecutive hand-rubbing or hand-wringing songs toward the end.

This is one of a trio of most-celebrated Gilbert & Sullivan operettas, which have brought attention to the lesser but still wonderful ones that are performed today. The Mikado is easily as enjoyable as the Price production of H.M.S. Pinafore four years ago at the Courthouse. Any votes for The Pirates of Penzance next year?


Issue Date: July 29 - August 4, 2005
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