“And Others of His Race”: Blackface and Yellowface

“At Best Only a Monkey Shaved”: The Shared Spaces of Blackface and Yellowface

All productions of The Mikado have a connection to blackface minstrelsy, some more direct than others. Gilbert’s lyrics twice make reference to blackface minstrel performance, in lines inevitably altered for contemporary productions. Ko-Ko’s original “little list” of “society offenders . . . who never would be missed” includes, along with others such as “piano-organist” and “the people who eat peppermint and puff it in your face,” “the nigger-serenader, and the others of his race.” In “A More Humane Mikado,” the Mikado states that the fitting punishment for “The lady who dyes a chemical yellow / Or stains her grey hair puce / Or pinches her figger” is to be “blacked up like a nigger / With permanent walnut juice.” Though excised from contemporary productions, The Mikado’s specific connections to blackface minstrelsy are delineated through these casual mentions and accentuated by a striking “Bab” illustration (one of Gilbert’s comic drawings, frequently accompanying his poems and lyrics).

By 1885, blackface minstrel performances were as popular in Victorian Britain as in the United States. Michael Pickering notes, “From their first wave of success in the late 1830s and early 1840s, minstrel acts, troupes, and shows figured as a staple item of the popular stage throughout the remaining decades of the century” and minstrelsy “continued to prove attractive to successive generations across all social classes, and among men and women of the large urban centres, provincial towns, and outlying rural areas alike.”12 Both Gilbert and Sullivan were quite familiar with blackface minstrelsy. Gilbert records at least one trip to see a benefit of Burgess and Moore minstrels,13 and in a letter to his brother in 1860, Arthur Sullivan notes his enthusiastic participation in “a grand nigger performance” while a student in Leipzig.14 In act 2 of their final collaboration, Utopia Unlimited, Gilbert and Sullivan include a song, “Society Has Quite Forsaken,” in which characters arrange their chairs across the stage “like Christy Minstrels”; Gilbert’s manuscript libretto calls for them to produce a banjo, set of bones, and tambourines to accompany their song.15

In the United States, most popular Gilbert and Sullivan operas inspired both blackface minstrel parodies as well as productions by African American performers. For instance, an African American version of H.M.S. Pinafore opened in the Globe Theatre in New York on April 28, 1879, not long after the London opening, of which the New York Herald remarked that the complexions of the actors “ranged from cream colour, through café au lait to strong coffee without milk, with various grades of less coffee and more milk.”16 Gilbert and Sullivan, with their satiric targets easily adapted to local settings, regularly provided new inspiration for American black-face minstrelsy. The Mikado spawned its own set of parodies. Thatcher, Primrose, and West Minstrels began a run of The Mick-ah-do on November 2, 1885, soon after the American production itself opened. Later in the year, they returned to perform The Black Mikado, likely the same show under a different name, which ran well into 1886.17 Parodies of The Mikado were also performed by Haverly’s, McIntyre and Heath’s, and Carncross’s Minstrels in 1886.18

Thus in a broader sense, the style of playing Japanese in The Mikado is put in place not only by British orientalism but also by blackface minstrelsy. Blackface minstrelsy formulated and formalized a way of representing African Americans as well as other racial groups. As Robert Toll and others have noted, the structure of blackface minstrel shows (and their later incarnations as variety or vaudeville shows) allowed for a quick succession of different ethnic types such as Chinese, German, Dutch, and Irish immigrants and American Indians.19

In America and Great Britain, blackface minstrels also made profitable use of Japanese tropes to add interest and novelty to their acts. Shows capitalizing on the popularity of Japanese acrobatics, whether incorporating actual Japanese acrobatic troupes or performed by their blackface imitators, were a frequent part of minstrel performances. Toll writes that touring Japanese acrobats inspired a host of minstrel portrayals of the “jap-oh-knees” between 1865 and 1867. At least eight major minstrel companies performed takeoffs on this new sensation, advertised as “The Flying Black Japs,” in the most glowing rhetoric—“balancing, juggling, top spinning, and enchanted ladders, ham-sandwich-cellar-kitchen and his beautiful son all wrong.20 . . . assisted by eleven or eight other ‘japs,’”—or simply with the single bold word “jap.”21 In the early 1880s, J. H. Haverly presented a “Colossal Japanese Show” with jugglers, tumblers, and necromancers, from “the court of his Imperial Majesty the Mikado of Japan.”22 Musical and dance numbers were also popular; the loosely incorporative structure of blackface minstrelsy lent itself to introducing Japanese racial performances to lend an exotic flavor to familiar fare. In 1867, Burgess, Moore, and Crocker’s Christy Minstrels show at London’s St. James Hall included a “Mr. W. P. Collins” performing a “solo on the Japanese fiddle” to be followed, the program announced, “by a Christy’s Burlesque on a Chinese Dance.” The first part of an evening of song and ballads by the London-based Mohawk Minstrels in 1886 concluded with “a New and Original Japaneasy Absurdity by Harry Hunter and Edward Forman” titled “O Come Let Us Be Jappy Together.”23

Blackface minstrelsy and its later forms such as variety and burlesque thus became one of the vehicles by which yellowface developed. The structure of blackface minstrel shows, with different sketches that did not require a common narrative thread, easily incorporated the oriental as a novelty act, adding interest and variety to the more familiar songs and patter of minstrelsy, providing an opportunity for grand spectacle, and giving performers the chance to show different talents.

As African Americans moved into the performance spaces of minstrelsy, they too adopted these familiar imaginings of Japanese and other orientals. Henry T. Sampson records the changing status of African Americans in theater during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For the most part, they were confined to roles that had been defined by white performers in blackface; however, they could also take advantage of the minstrel stage in order to showcase their considerable talents in music, dance, and acting. By the early decades of the twentieth century, African Americans were taking on roles that allowed them a limited measure of innovation. Minstrelsy, as James Weldon Johnson describes, served both to reinforce racial stereotypes and to afford new opportunities for the African American performer:

Minstrelsy was, on the whole, a caricature of Negro life, and it fixed a stage tradition which has not yet been entirely broken. It fixed the tradition of the Negro as only an irresponsible, happy-go-lucky, wide-grinning, loud-laughing, shuffling, banjo-playing, singing, dancing sort of being. Nevertheless, these companies did provide stage training and theatrical experience for a large number of coloured men. They provided an essential training and theatrical experience which, at the time, could not have been acquired from any other source.24

Playing Japanese and other oriental characterizations, common in minstrelsy, allowed African American performing artists this opportunity to escape racist caricatures. Ethnic lampooning was a common feature of blackface minstrelsy, which stereotyped not only blacks but also a whole range of racial and ethnic types. African American minstrel performers were able to adopt, albeit in a limited way, the privilege of white performers to impersonate other races. Caricatures of immigrant Chinese as played by African Americans, for instance, were regular features of the vaudeville stage; as Krystyn Moon writes, impersonations of Chinese immigrants were quite popular among African American comedians from the 1890s through the 1920s:

Through Chinese impersonations, African Americans were able to ally themselves with whites by marking the Chinese as different from the white norm, as they themselves had been marked. These characterizations, however, focused on both racial inferiority and the foreignness and inability of the Chinese to assimilate. This image contrasted with blackface caricatures that not only confirmed white perceptions of racial inferiority but also imagined African American culture as central to what it meant to be American.25

Moon asserts that if white performers of blackface minstrelsy depicted both black and Chinese immigrants on the stage “to reaffirm the inferiority of both groups” but also to “highlight the foreignness of Chinese immigrants,” then one way of understanding African American performers of comic Chinese characters is that they worked to differentiate themselves from the Chinese, thus “asserting their role in the creation of American identity and culture.”26

It is troubling to imagine the terms of African American racial uplift as simply a transfer of what had been formerly the privilege of white actors to impersonate a variety of nonwhite races in stereotypical ways. Thus in instances where African Americans perform in yellowface, we seek some kind of complexity, irony, or at least self-consciousness. It is tempting to read more deeply into anything that might indicate another dimension, as in this Chicago Star review of an October 1909 performance of noted African American comedian Sam Cook:

Sam Cook, in the comedy Chinese-character impersonation, is the unique feature of a vaudeville bill entertaining practically throughout at the Grand this week. Ordinarily the announcement of a stage Chinaman is a signal to cringe, and when it is coupled with a sketch that suggests a laundry it means to cringe all the harder. But Cook and his partner, Jim Stevens, who presents a Negro character that serves as an excellent foil to the Chinaman, make their sketch, “No Checkee, No Wash-ee,” the hit of the bill. Cook, apparently, has discarded the traditional stage Chinaman in toto, has gone out into Chinatown and studied the Chinaman from life, and then has created and embellished a character true to life and, more important, to stage art. He gives to John Chinaman some little irresistible touches.27

The title of the sketch suggests that it does not deviate too far from conventional stereotype; at the same time, the reviewer at least finds this performance quite different from the conventional stage Chinaman. In dispensing with “the traditional stage Chinaman” and actually observing “the Chinaman from life,” Cook gives his “John Chinaman” those “little irresistible touches.” Perhaps there is a movement, however limited, toward challenging and dislocating not just stereotypes of African Americans but other racial groups as well.

Similarly, there is also a more complex interpretation of how African Americans performed American Indian characters in musical comedies such as The Red Moon (1909). Set in a government school, The Red Moon tells the story of Minnehaha, the “half-breed daughter of an Indian chief who fifteen years before had deserted her and her [African American mother] and returned to the wandering of his people and the Land of the Setting Sun”; this chief “suddenly returns and claims his child over the protests of the Negro mother and her friends”; the presentation of this story afforded, according to one contemporary report, “some splendid situations and brilliant lines, both comic and sentimental.” The Red Moon employed a number of recognizable stereotypes of the stage Indian, as well as conventional minstrel numbers such as comedian Edgar Conner singing “Sambo.”28

The portrayal of American Indian characters allowed African American actors to demonstrate their acting and musical talents. The Freeman praised “Arthur Talbot as ‘John Lowdog,’” who “gave the public its first taste of Indian character work with merit by a Negro,” and described that when J. Rosemond Johnson as Plunk Green and Abbie Mitchell as Minnehaha sang “The Red Shawl” song, the experience was “the neatest yet that has been offered in the form of Indian lovemaking. It made many young lovers in the house wish they were Indians.” The play was acclaimed by the Indianapolis Freeman not only as musically worthy (“at last in the big league”; “the real goods”; with music “the best that was ever offered by Negroes”) but also racially momentous: “This piece has crossed the line, ‘no classic colored shows,’ that has been drawn by the managers and press. They flatly turned back Abyssinia; now they are face to face with another.”29 But David Krasner points out that “while Cole and Johnson avoided stereotyping African Americans, they were not so generous to Native Americans.”30 “Cole and Johnson’s relationship to Native Americans was certainly ambivalent: on the one hand, they cut against the grain of American ethnology that argued that mixing the races would lead to social collapse; on the other hand, they portrayed Native Americans as a rung below African Americans.31

While African American performers may have been lauded for their “true to life” characterizations of Chinamen and Indians on the stage, their portrayals of “Japanese” were evidently much less concerned with any notions of realism. Like the white minstrel companies, African American performers used Japanese acts for the most part to add a touch of fantasy as well as novelty to their shows. One example can be found in Oriental America, one of the earliest all-black vaudeville shows. Oriental America opened August 3, 1897, at Palmer’s Theatre in New York City under the direction of John W. Isham.32 The show was popular in New York, and subsequently toured in England.33 According to the Washington Morning Times, this production included “a company of sweet singers and talented performers, the cream of the colored race,” and highlighted both spectacle and the singing talents of the performers: “The several scenes in the each act have been given the benefit of very attractive and elaborate scenic and electric embellishment and especially is this so in the last act, where in are presented prominent scenes using appropriate costumes from well-known standard operas of the several schools, to which fully forty minutes were devoted.” The reviewer notes, “Among the many features of the great show were a Japanese dance, cleverly rendered by Fanny Rutledge, Pearl Meredith, Alice Mackey and Carrie Meredith, who sang and danced equally well and were prominent in all the ensemble scenes of the performance. A quartet of cycling girls in bloomers and twentieth century maids, the maids of the Oriental Huzzars, led by Miss Belle Davis, as well as the hunting scene and opening chorus from the ‘Bells of Cornville.’”34

How much the popularity of the show depended on its oriental content is certainly a matter for speculation. Despite the show’s title, there certainly did not seem to be a sustained theme of any kind; later accounts emphasize its importance in the history of African American theater without any mention of the “Japanese dance, cleverly rendered” or the “Oriental Huzzars.”35 At the same time, the performance of these elements does raise a question of how we should read the playing of yellowface by African Americans. Is it substantively different from white actors playing yellowface? Of white actors in blackface minstrelsy? On the positive side, it does clear a space for the advancement of African American performers beyond their own racial caricatures; beyond that, the best we might hope for is that it also dislocates both racial stereotypes of “blackness” and “yellowness” through playing on the disjunction of the actor’s body and the racial stereotype.

Yellowface by African American rather than white performers does create a sense of uncertainty insofar that it dislodges the exclusive hold that whiteness has over the enactment of other races and exposes all of these representations as artificial rather than natural. Like African American performers first forced to black up in order to inhabit the stages of black-face minstrelsy, African American performers of yellowface are inevitably compared to their white counterparts. However convincing their renditions, their bodies never fully dissolve into the roles they take on. What is foregrounded is precisely the imitative and performative mechanisms and actions of yellowface; how they act, rather than inhabit, a role.

Japanese Tommies

Scholarship on blackface minstrelsy often highlights either a straightforward racist stereotyping or the complex mechanisms of substitution and surrogation that go on between white minstrel performers and the black bodies they emulate. I would suggest that the workings of yellow-face inevitably disrupt both of these processes, resulting in much more uneasy identifications. This is amplified in the case of African American minstrel performers whose roles include yellowface.

One striking example might be the career of the African American performer Thomas Dilward (also spelled “Dilworth” or “Dilwerd”), who took as his stage name “Japanese Tommy.” Dilward was the second African American performer (the first was the renowned dancer Henry “Juba” Lane) to gain success performing with white minstrel companies. Dilward began his career in 1853 with Christy’s Minstrels (the same year that Commodore Matthew Perry opened Japan to American trade, which may have inspired his stage name). Subsequently, he went on to play in a range of companies, including the mostly white Dan Bryant’s Minstrels, Woods’ Minstrels, Morris Brothers’ Minstrels, and Kelly and Leon’s Minstrels, as well as with African American troupes such as the Original and Only Georgia Minstrels Slave Troupe, managed by Charles B. Hicks.36 Dil-ward made appearances around the world, including a tour of Ireland and other parts of Great Britain, in 1869–70, with Sam Hague’s Great American Slave Troupe.37 His career lasted quite a few years, as evidenced by his appearance with Hiscock and Hayman’s Australian Federal Minstrels, who visited at the Free Trade Hall in Manchester from October 1880 until spring 1881.38

Dilward’s success is measured by his relatively long career as well as by his star billing. He played the violin, sang, danced, and appeared in sketches; his short stature was also part of his attraction, and he was compared with such acts as P. T. Barnum’s Tom Thumb and Bryant’s Minstrels’ Little Mac.39 A playbill for the performance at the Grand Circus Pavilion, Swansea, in the week of March 29, 1869, has the headline “The Great American Slave Troupe and Japanese Tommy” and describes him as “The Tom Thumb of Africa, 36 Years of Age and only 35 inches in height.”40 His funeral notice described him as “a popular songster and a contortionist” who “appeared in both male and female parts” (not unusual, since cross-gender casting was common practice in minstrel performance).41 A photograph taken between 1855 and 1865 seems to indicate a fairly prosperous as well as genial man. Nonetheless, at his funeral it was reported that “but few friends were present.”42

It is not clear to what extent “Japanese Tommy” cultivated any particularly Japanese aspects to his act. Neither photographs nor reviews indicate any particular affinity for Japanese dress or characterization, although he may have appeared with George W. Harding, the stage manager for the Boston Dime Museum and dialect comedian and vocalist, to present the skit “Fun in a Chinese Laundry.”43 In one photograph included in Harry Reynolds’s Minstrel Memories, he is dressed in a rather vaguely oriental way but is carrying a broom (a prop that Dale Cockrell suggests is connected both to blackface minstrelsy and mummer plays).44 Yet his name and one particular reference indicate that he clearly capitalized on playing Japanese as a marketable identity. Importantly, curiosity about Japanese Tommy is prompted by both his size and the racial mobility that his performance affords him.

There was also at the Bryants’ the “Japanese Tommy; or What is it?” some three feet six inches in height, and as great a puzzle for physiologists as the “What is it?” at Barnum’s. We sat with open mouth and dubious soul while gazing at this nondescript. We marveled at how he was made, and questioned in our minds as to what theatrical manufacturer had begotten him. Whoever it is, he has turned out an unmistakably well finished article, and such a one as admirably answers the purpose of those who engage him.”45

The “What is it?” asked of Japanese Tommy, and his long-term success with a range of audiences otherwise unwelcoming of African American performers, might point to some possibility of escaping the rigid artistic and economic limitations placed on African American performers. In becoming the exotic object of Japanese curiosity, Dilward can escape the tedium of enacting standard minstrel fare and earn praise as “an unmistakably well finished article” and, evidently, an admirable performer.

Dilward may indeed have developed his moniker to capitalize on the fame of another “Japanese Tommy,” a member of the first Japanese embassy to the United States in 1860. Tateishi Onojirō Noriyuki, a teenager traveling with his interpreter uncle, became a minor celebrity during his visit to the United States.46 He was nicknamed “Tommy” after his childhood name Tamehachi and was called “a darling fellow” and a “Japanese prince” by U.S. newspapers.47 The praise of Tommy was consistent with racializations of the Japanese as more white than other Asians, calling the Japanese “the British of Asia” (Harper’s Weekly) or asserting that “no nation possesses so many elements of the Anglo-Saxon mind as the Japanese” (Washington [D.C.] Evening Star); the Philadelphia Press included a description of Tommy as “almost Caucasian in his complexion.”48 Still, this interpretation of the Japanese as almost white is premature, as seen in a satirical cartoon that appeared in Harper’s Weekly on June 30, 1860.49 The “Colored Gentleman” waiting tables refuses to hear the gentleman’s demand of “Here, you Nigger, come here!” and replies “Nigger!—no Nigger, Sar; me Japanese, Sar!” In the second frame, “Tommy,” dressed in kimono and described as “a little how-came-you-so,” looks drunkenly through a pile of bricks, hiccupping, “One of dem (hic) is my Hat me know; but me be (hic) if me can tell which him is.” Titled “Natural Mistakes,” the picture draws attention to the “natural” confusion between characterizations of African Americans and Japanese. The “Natural Mistakes” cartoon provides a framework for thinking about Thomas Dilward’s “Japanese Tommy” as well as Tateishi Onojirō Noriyuko; it points out the ridicule underlying the social elevation of the Japanese man and accuses the African American of asserting a Japanese identity in a vain attempt to escape being a “nigger.” There is little difference between the “What is it?” and the “a little-how-came-you-so”; the alter ego of both is the colored man who seeks to move beyond his station.

This makes clear the conflicted nature of African Americans taking on other racial roles: while these roles allowed them some measure of artistic freedom and even some claims to being American by virtue of this racial masquerade, at the same time it also accentuated their debased status as black. White minstrel performers, although perhaps stained by their racial impersonations,50 could remove the mask. African American performers were marked differently through the confluence of their own authentic blackness and by their association with other “coloreds.” Their racial masking could show their talents, but it could not allow them the privilege of being the “neutral” white body, on which a host of racial others might be played.

Thus the performance by African Americans of these other racial types was one of both association and disavowal. They mocked immigrants such as the Chinese, whose unintelligible gibberish and manners marked them as inexorably foreign, and enacted barbaric or primitive characterizations of Indians or Africans. At the same time, they themselves were in danger of losing the distinctions they might be trying to make between themselves and other Others. On one level, playing Japanese imbued the African American body with the value of becoming a fashionable novelty. But within this act of playing, the African American body does not gain the privilege of disappearing into the role. Rather, the body of the actor is marked by its blackness and measured by its ability to play “yellow”: in terms of audience, there is at times little difference found between the two.

African American Mikados and Racial Uplift

Late nineteenth-and early twentieth-century African American performances of operas, including The Mikado, provided a much clearer opportunity for African American performers to demonstrate both their talent and their dignity. The early part of the twentieth century saw the rise of a black middle class for whom The Mikado was popular, for a variety of possible reasons. Reginald Kearney describes the success of a 1905 Indianapolis production, attributing it to a particular kind of racial solidarity between African Americans and Japanese:

When the black citizens of Indianapolis decided to put on the opera The Mikado for the benefit of the St. Philips Episcopal Mission building fund, the event was acclaimed as “one of the most successful from the standpoint of merit and attendance ever given by the colored people of the city.” People from Marion, Muncie, Anderson, and Evansville joined “the city’s representative colored people” in making the event a success. Tickets for the opera were to go on sale at eight o’clock Monday morning at Pink’s drug store, but an irritated music lover complained that she and several other ladies had arrived before the appointed time only to find that others had queued up from midnight of the previous night, and 75 percent of the tickets had already sold out.51

Kearney argues that some deeper political affinity of African Americans for Japanese people and culture might underlie the choice of The Mikado as entertainment; his larger thesis implies that such cultural choices may have been dictated by what Vijay Prashad calls “polyculturalism” or Bill Mullen describes as “Afro-Orientalism”: the admiration and affinity for Asian countries such as Japan, India, and China held by African American writers such as W. E. B. Du Bois and the shared activist struggles of those of African and Asian descent “to escape the prison house of racist capitalism.”52 It is difficult, however, to find radical solidarity expressed through these African American productions of The Mikado. Upon investigation, they seemed predictably light orientalist entertainment in much the same vein as the Savoy productions, and thus one might dismiss them as part of what Mullen calls a “secret history” of cultural fetishization.53 However, there is something interesting about how African American productions that, even in embracing the commodity racism of decorative orientalism, also invested The Mikado with their own desires for African American racial uplift.

For instance, on May 27, 1914, a production of The Mikado, described as “a Japanese comic opera,” was reviewed by L. P. Williams in the New York Age. This production was performed at the Star Casino on 107th Street, New York, by members of the choirs of St. Benedict’s Church and accompanied by the New Amsterdam Orchestra under the direction of H. G. Marshall. Politics or cross-racial solidarity were far from Williams’s mind; instead, his review highlighted the singing (particularly Mrs. O. L. Hooper in the role of Katisha, “the feature of the evening”) and praised the costumes, which were clearly featured in the staging: “After the performance the whole cast escorted front and rear by the ushers gave the public a better view of their Japanese costumes by parading in a grand march.”54

Another review of a production of The Mikado, the previous year, begins by echoing these terms. The reviewer, R. G. Doggett, a student at Howard University, reported that the packed performance of The Mikado, by the Choral Society of the Washington Conservatory of Music at the Howard Theatre on March 1, “scored an instantaneous success, both on account of its melodious and well scored music, as well as its playful satire.” He congratulated Mrs. H. G. Marshall on the “choice of this opera as a medium for the exploitation of the excellent talent of the members of the choral society” and had warm praise for the conductor Jesse Shipp (“one of the race’s greatest producers and stage managers”), the scenery (“there has been nothing seen on the Howard stage this season that has surpassed the gorgeous and bizarre taste in which this opera was mounted”), and many of the leads.55

However warm Doggett’s praise, he did criticize some of the leading players, such as Louis Howard as Pooh-Bah (“a charming performance” but “a miserable failure from a vocal standpoint”). Interestingly enough, he also criticized the inadequacy of the racial makeup, chiding the performers for failing to represent the supposed uniformity of the Japanese “type” even while acknowledging the variety of skin tones that the African American performers presented:

Very few took advantage of the opportunity to properly make up so as to look the type they were supposed to impersonate. Instead of a large company of Japanese the audience was presented to a set of faces resembling every color in the rainbow, with a few additional studies in black to complete the spectacle of many colors.

According to Doggett, “The best Japanese in the company [was] Miss Edith Chandler, a member of the chorus. The greatest offenders of all in the way of make up were seven or eight members of the male chorus who made a piteous spectacle.”56

This review came under fire when, two weeks later, Lester A. Walton, critic for the New York Age, took Doggett to task for his more unkind assessments. Walton cited defensive comments from others who attended the production, such as Howard University senior Adolph Dodge, who saw the production as “the most artistic, elaborate, and successful affair ever given in the Howard Theatre,” and was angry at Doggett’s “scathing, unjust, and incompetent criticism,” and Dr. A. P. Albert, who resented the “faint praise intermixed with harsh criticism” that Doggett provided in his earlier review and voiced the “general opinion . . . that the ‘Mikado’ was very creditably rendered and that it was greatly enjoyed by the audience was clearly shown by the frequent and, at times, prolonged applause.” Moreover, Albert states, “The columns of The Age should be used to encourage rather than to dampen the ardor of the members of the race in their efforts making for the uplift of the race.”57 These reviews and responses suggest that the popularity of African American productions of The Mikado was deeply connected to the hope of racial uplift; the successes of African American performers who could perform classics such as Gilbert and Sullivan were meant to inspire all the race.

Many African American responses to The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado were consistent with this directive. Some hailed The Mikado as part of a larger racial project that insisted on equal rights and dignity for African American performers and audiences. Tenor Maurice Cooper, who played Nanki-Poo in Swing Mikado, declares, “The Federal Theater is tearing down the antiquated idea that the Negro in theater is a buffoon. He has been given a chance to display his ability as a serious artist.”58 Reviewing Swing Mikado for the Chicago Defender, Nahum Daniel Brascher predicts that “this production will demonstrate to the nation that audiences will go to the theatre and see living people perform, and that it will not only have a long run in Chicago, but will equal ‘Green Pastures’ [Marc Connelly’s Pulitzer Prize– winning 1930 play] in general interest nationally.” Brascher gives credit to the production as “the supreme achievement in Federal Theatre production” and notes:

One of the true inspirations to me is in my knowledge of the fine ambitions of so many of the men and women, trained in the best schools and colleges of the country, and fitted for the very work they are so efficiently doing, but present national economic conditions had to open this new “Door of Opportunity” for them. These people are not amateurs, novices. They rise to the occasion because they love their work, and because they have a vision of a new day for demonstrating to the world their ability to bring entertainment and appreciation to the American public.59

On the one hand, The Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado were clearly employed in the service of racial uplift, using the performance of Japanese as a way of proving that African Americans perform musical classics in ways that demonstrated their talents and rendered their skin color moot. On the other hand, these productions made use of rather than challenged racial clichés about African Americans, casting them as primitive and sexualized. Praise by reviewers of The Swing Mikado are particularly rife with stereotypes of blackness:

But just as you are becoming reconciled to another cut-price Gilbert and Sullivan revival, the performers grin and strut and begin stamping out the hot rhythms with animal frenzy. “Za-zu-za-zu,” the three little maids from school say huskily, breaking down into a smoking caper. All this is something to see and hear. If they are going to swing, let them swing the whole thing with abandon, for these are the folks who can do it. . . . The chorus includes some dusky wenches who can dance for the Savoyard jitterbugs with gleaming frenzy, tossing their heads in wild delight. There are also some corpulent dames, whose loose construction puts swing into the category of perilous professions.60

Did you know that Sir Arthur Sullivan’s melody, “Flowers that Bloom in the Spring,” is so primitive in its elements that it can be reduced to a jungle beating of tom-toms?

Or that “Three Little Maids from School Are We” is so pagan, despite its surface innocence, that it calls for a dozen encores when a little brown girl in the chorus winds it up with climatic movement of a Mata-Hari dance?

Or that song about letting “Punishment Fit the Crime” can be gradually speeded up so that, toward the finish, it is a perfect orgy of bacchanalian dancing?

If not, you haven’t seen the All-Negro version of “The Mikado” being presented by the Federal Theater at the Great Northern.61

Musically, The Swing Mikado contrasted each straight rendition of Sullivan’s songs with swing versions, thus suggesting that the performance of the classic might pave the way for a more truly “black” performance to follow; in converting the entire score to swing, The Hot Mikado capitalized further on the popularity of seeing African Americans perform their “natural” rhythms. Ronald Radano has describe how, at the beginning of the twentieth century, American public culture embraced

a radically new conception of black music that gave special emphasis to qualities of rhythm. While rhythm had always been associated with African and African-American musical performances, it now seemed to overtake other aspects, identifying what many believed to be the music’s vital essence. Black music’s propulsive and seductive “hot” rhythm—a term linked etymologically to forms of excess—seemed at once underdetermined and saturated with context specific meaning.62

The change from Sullivan’s orchestration to the “hot” rhythms of swing clearly gave the audience license to imagine The Mikado transformed into what Radano describes as “a hot fantasy of racialized sound” that links its African American performers with “animal dances” and a “savage” jazz animated by “jungle rhythms.”63

This view of the music in these productions was clearly highlighted by reviewers as the animating force that revealed the true nature of their African American performers. The Swing Mikado South Seas setting effectively fused stereotypes of black primitives and brown exotic natives; for Lloyd Lewis, this is a “Mikado Malayed”:

Gilbert and Sullivan’s “Mikado” has been transplanted to an island in the Pacific, a South Sea welter of brown skins, totem poles, grass collars and red sarongs. . . . Japan was all gone from the scene and the songs—all but the fans, and these didn’t last long into the play. The male principals were made up like comic artists’ impressions of cannibals, the Mikado wearing the stereotyped plug hat and Ko-Ko wearing an outlandish pattern of rubber balls over his strong robes and colossal headdress.64

In The Hot Mikado the costumes and scenery created a fantastic and opulent space that only vaguely echoed Japan: for Rosamond Gilder, “the play is left in a highly imaginary Japan, decorated with street lamps made to look like dice against a striped backdrop suggesting Fujiyama.”65 The addition of such favorite acts as the Lindy Dancers from the Savoy Ballroom in Harlem further reinforced that the fantastic sets and costumes of The Hot Mikado did not reference Japan but the more familiar nightclubs of Harlem. Thus The Hot Mikado openly evoked how African American musicians and dancers became “hot” racial commodities for white consumers; Langston Hughes vividly describes a time when “the Negro was in vogue,” with “the growing influx of whites toward Harlem after sundown, flooding the little cabarets and bars where formerly only colored people laughed and sang,” and when “strangers were given the best ringside tables to sit and stare at the Negro customers—like amusing animals in a zoo.”66 Hughes takes more direct aim at The Swing Mikado in his “Notes on Commercial Theatre”:

You’ve taken my blues and gone—

You sing ’em on Broadway

And you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl,

And you mixed ’em up with symphonies

And you fixed ’em

So they don’t sound like me.

Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.

You also took my spirituals and gone.

You put me in Macbeth and Carmen Jones

And all kinds of Swing Mikados

And in everything but what’s about me—

But someday somebody’ll

Stand up and talk about me,

And write about me—

Black and beautiful—

And sing about me, And put on plays about me!

I reckon it’ll be

Me myself!

Yes, it’ll be me.67

The Mikado’s Crossover Roles

Apparently, according to promptbooks, neither reference to “niggers” in the original text of the opera seems to have been changed for either The Swing Mikado or The Hot Mikado, despite other changes to the dialogue. In addition, these productions actually highlighted their use of minstrel traditions. Bob Parrish, The Hot Mikado’s Nanki-Poo, performed “A Wandering Minstrel” with a banjo instead of a Japanese samisen.68 Edward Fraction, The Swing Mikado’s Mikado, the only non–African American performer, was known as an experienced minstrel performer,69 and his cakewalk with Katisha (Rosa Brown) in the second act was one of the hits of the production.70 Michael Rogin has noted how the increasingly liberal attitudes of the 1920s and 1930s were not incompatible with the continued popularity of blackface minstrelsy; in fact, blackface was thought by many to be an essential element of African American culture:

Outside the NAACP, almost no whites questioned it. White liberals mostly assumed that blackface was another instance of cross-racial sympathy. Eleanor Roosevelt and the cosmopolitan journalist and Socialist Heywood Broun loved Amos ’n’ Andy. Rhapsody in Blue, with its left-wing screenwriters Elliot Paul and Howard Koch, brought back the blackface Jolson. Larry Parks, who played him in the Jolson biopics, was the Communist leader of the left wing of the Screen Actors Guild (which opposed “discrimination against Negroes in the motion picture industry” and the stereotyping of African Americans).71

The reviewers’ constant comparison of the old version with its new swing incarnation suggests that they see it as infused with a primitive life and the abandon characteristic of “Negroes.” “For it is an original notion,” Brooks Atkinson claims, “to slide ‘The Mikado’ into the groove of black and hot rhythm, and this dark company is full of high spirits. When they give ‘The Mikado’ a Cotton Club finish they raise the body temperature considerably.”72 However “original” this notion, the “dark companies” mentioned by Atkinson are preceded by a long history of “blacked-up Mikados” that associates blackness with primitive energy, sexuality, and comic release. These versions point out deeper parallels between the original opera and blackface traditions. It is not so much that blackface minstrelsy might have influenced Gilbert and Sullivan (although undoubtedly it did) as it is that the unruliness—and with it an associated idea of race—inscribed into productions of the opera can easily find an expression through the characteristic forms of blackface minstrelsy.

Blackface minstrelsy, of course, construed black bodies as barely civilized and exploited the humor that lay in their malapropisms, jokes, gesticulations, and rude gestures; these were funny precisely because they disrupted the confines of proper language and deportment. The Japanese figures of The Mikado, despite their carefully regulated and correct behavior, also demonstrate a propensity for such titillating transgressions. In the context of the opera, these racial epithets associate the “blacking up” of minstrelsy with debasement and the bodily grotesque. In the lyrics of Ko-Ko’s “little list,” minstrel performers, white as well as black, are placed into the same “race”; all are guilty of the same social annoyance that is worthy of execution. In the Mikado’s song, white women who dye their hair or corset their waists deserve the permanent stain of blackface. While in chapter 1 I suggested that the guiding mode of the opera is to look at what is Japanese solely in terms of an obsession with objects, I would suggest here that another—and not unrelated—dimension of the opera is its presentation of characters whose beautifully wrought and objectified exteriors barely disguise what is beneath: a primitive, irrational and ultimately cruel race. Within the characterizations of The Mikado there is the constant shifting from the image of refined beauty to its opposite, grotesque savagery, from which arises the irony of the Mikado, who praises himself for being “humane” yet rejoices in the most horrible punishments for transgressions.

At first the opera’s proposed punishment either for “blacking up” or by “blacking up” seems quite different from, say, act 2’s making-up of the bride-to-be Yum-Yum. A much prettier picture emerges in “Braid the Raven Hair,” where “Art and nature thus allied, / Go to make a pretty bride.” However, a much more grotesque image is shown by Gilbert’s “Bab” drawing for the lyrics “Paint the pretty face—/ Dye the coral lip,” which show a squatting Yum-Yum being painted by a simian Ko-Ko.

As we have seen in the discussion of the Japanese Native Villages, racial categorization still portrayed actual Japanese people as barbaric, primitive, and inferior (despite their ability to produce beautiful items for consumption). Rotem Kowner notes that in the latter half of the nineteenth century, Darwin’s theories were frequently used to categorize nonwhite races as apelike: “This theory, once used to describe only Africans (and Irish), was now applied to any non-white people, wherein the Japanese were no exception. . . . For many writers and artists, the Japanese were at their most simian when they were trying to be modern.” Kowner notes, “Toward the end of the century, an increasing number of writers, even the prominent John Ruskin, Pierre Loti, and Charles Baudelaire, adopted ad nauseum simian images when describing Japanese features and behaviour.”73 This is clearly shown in Frenchman Georges Bigot’s caricature “Monsieur et Madame vont dans la Monde,” which pictures a Japanese couple in modern dress looking into a mirror; their reflection shows them as monkeys in human dress.74

Gilbert’s lyrics and “Bab” illustration for the song “A Lady Fair, of Lineage High” in the opera Princess Ida, immediately preceding The Mikado, also conjures up a similar image of a monkey with aspirations toward civilization:

He bought white ties, and he bought dress suits,

He crammed his feet into bright tight boots—

And to start in life on a brand-new plan,

He christened himself Darwinian Man!

But it would not do,

The scheme fell through—

For the Maiden fair, whom the monkey craved,

Was a radiant Being,

With a brain far-seeing—

While a man, however well-behaved,

At best is only a monkey shaved!

The Mikado presents a world of animated objects, familiar-yet-exotic commodities that were an inseparable part of the domestic space of Victorian England and America. Inherent even in those performances, however, was a different force that equally figured in productions of the opera. Comic moments provided opportunity for emphasizing an anarchic, sexual, and youthful energy. It is this energy that becomes coded as raw, primitive, disorderly, and “black” in blackface minstrelsy. The core of blackface’s appeal, then, lies not only in the racial impersonations taking place but also in the disorder that is suggested by this impersonation.

Thus the orientalism of The Mikado seems only on the surface to be a spectacular yet dignified and refined patrician experience. Underneath are more riotously comic and/or fearfully debased characterizations and actions. These, I suggest, draw not only from the English burlesque tradition, with figures such as the oriental despot and the Widow Twankay,75 but also from the riotous performances of blackface minstrelsy. Two characterizations in particular offer interesting resonances with some of the familiar types of blackface minstrelsy. The role of Katisha is transformed from a caricature of aging white femininity directly descended from English comedies of an earlier century (Congreve’s Lady Wishfort, for instance), to the strong, mature, and sexually rapacious black woman whose “devilish” appearance inspires both fear and admiration. Comparisons might well be made between the role of Katisha and the male drag performances of minstrel, particularly “funny old gal,” who with the more seductive “wench” was one of the staples of blackface minstrelsy. The reference in the Mikado’s song to the “lady who dyes a chemical yellow / or stains her grey hair puce” is often linked to Katisha (who in many productions has bright “puce” hair); thus her fate is to be figuratively blacked-up in punishment. Katisha, confident that she is attractive and worthy of love, in spite of her advanced years and grotesque appearance, resembles some of the figures of blackface minstrel songs such as “Miss Ebony Rose,” in which an equally aggressive female of dubious attractions threatens to chase down and punish her errant lover. Like Katisha’s accounts of her “left shoulder-blade,” “right elbow,” and “circulation,” Miss Ebony Rose names her various attractive parts for the audience and flaunts them openly and seductively.

I is Ebony Rose, as you may see,

From de iseland call’d Timbuctimbee—

Me ramble up and down dis town,

To look for de nigger what dey calls Jim Brown.

And if me cotch dis ole Jim Brown,

Dat plays dem cimbles about de town,

Me fust hit him up, and den hit him down,

Me play de berry debil wid dis ole Jim Brown.

Oh, I’se de gal what makes dem grin,

Wid de white-wash teef and de blackball chin—

Lips ob red, and turn-up nose,

I’se de beauty—Ebony Rose.76

Significantly, Hot Mikado reviewers often praised a similar racial typecasting of Katisha: Rosa Brown became “a Katisha who is no black-toothed hag but a Harlem siren, a Cotton Club Sadie Thompson, a cafe-au-lait Mae West, who has insinuating songs to sing.”77 Brooks Atkinson relates, “When Rosa Brown sweeps in as Katisha toward the end of the first act, things pick up immediately, for she is the most torrid of these sepia troubadours and a blues singer of quality.”78 Time magazine describes her as an “eye-rolling, hip-shaking, torch-singing Red Hot Mama,”79 and Variety praises her singing of the “I, Living I” number as “a smoking torch song.”80 For Richard Watts, this translation of the role of Katisha is the most welcome improvement on the original Mikado:

All of Gilbert’s meanest and most vindictive streak went into this malicious satirization of an ugly, aging woman longing for youth, and the result is as cruel and mean-spirited as it is dull and ineffectual. . . . It is all the more astonishing, therefore, to find that Katisha suddenly becomes one of the greatest virtues, rather than the outstanding drawback, of “The Hot Mikado.” Because Miss Rosa Brown, a gay and mischievous young woman with a look in her eye, plays the hitherto frightening matron with humor and sings the role in the manner of the hottest of torch singers, Katisha becomes the desirable one of the tale, and poor Yum-Yum is forgotten by everybody, probably including Nanki-Poo. In at least one way I find it difficult to describe this Miss Brown. The easy thing would be to call her a sepia Mae West, but she is so much superior to the estimable Diamond Lil that the comparison might be confusing.81

The tailor Ko-Ko, too, both in his false elevation to the status of Lord High Executioner and in his insistence on playing the heroic lead (“Must I never be allowed to soliloquize?” he mourns), seems to borrow from a standard role in blackface minstrelsy, the upstart Zip Coon, who was ridiculed for his pretensions to upper-class behavior. Whether or not they openly recalled Zip Coons of the past, both Herman Greene of The Swing Mikado and Eddie Green of The Hot Mikado echo minstrel performances in their performances. According to one reviewer, Herman Greene played Ko-Ko “as Bert Williams might have.”82 Hot Mikado’s Eddie Green is praised as “vastly amusing as Ko-Ko—melancholy, shuffling, putting his voice through the traditional jumps of the Negro comic.”83

It was perhaps impossible for African American performers to escape the inevitable comparisons with popular minstrel shows. Nonetheless, both The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado openly capitalized on the comic energies associated with blackface minstrelsy to enlarge the opera’s inherent sense of racial unruliness. The all-white productions of The Mikado that preceded them, as we have seen, incorporated corporeal humor from the start. The presence of African Americans intensified this in particular ways. Freed of the restraint of the Savoy style, what Audrey Williamson has described as “a traditional spirit avoiding vulgarity,”84 these versions of The Mikado turn blackness into a trope for release. Eric Lott suggests, “The minstrel show as an institution may be profitably understood as a major effort of corporeal containment—which is also to say that it necessarily trained a rather constant regard on the body.” If, as Lott states, blackface minstrelsy embodies the “twin streaks of insurrection and intermixture, the consequences, to white men’s minds of black men’s place in a slave economy,”85 The Mikado could also harness the incendiary powers of racial desires and anxieties projected through bodily display. Marshall and Jean Stearns relate a story about the Lindy dancers hired to perform in The Hot Mikado at the New York World’s Fair:

Making the best of an old stereotype, the male dancers in the troupe, who wore tight jersey trousers, padded their supporters with handkerchiefs (a trick that has been known to happen in ballet) and executed an occasional slow, stretching step facing the audience. It was a private joke. Eventually Mike Todd noticed it with horror. “If this isn’t stopped, I’ll never be able to put another show on Broadway.” He ran to the wardrobe mistress to ask whether the dancers were wearing supporters. When assured that they were, he decreed that thenceforth each must wear two supporters.86

The double standard is clear when the roles of Katisha, Ko-Ko, and others are inhabited by African American performers. While a racialized eroticism and a queer and quaint deviance are suggested in The Mikado’s original incarnations, casting these roles with African American performers intensifies these sexual references; Katisha is transformed into a “hot mama” and the Ko-Ko who can only fantasize about the use of his “snickersnee” moves between Zip Coon and Sambo. If the white performer can flirt with this racialized deviance as a form of harmless fun, the African American performer marks it as irretrievably aberrant.

Once again we recall earlier comments made in Doggett’s 1913 review of The Mikado in the New York Age. When Doggett criticizes the Howard University company for presenting “a set of faces resembling every color in the rainbow” instead of presenting a convincing “Japanese type,” he is only upholding the standards of racial impersonation that made the Savoy players so popular. His hope and expectation is for the African American performer to be able to do as the white performer does, to make a convincing racial transformation. However, the greater challenge was the prejudices facing African Americans, who were inevitably thought of in terms of an essentialized blackness. In the case of The Mikado this “inherent” primitivism was seen to bring out what was already considered queer about playing Japanese, the titillating sexual deviance and sense of transgression that underlay certain roles in The Mikado.

This appears in the two contrasting portrayals of the Three Little Maids that appear on 1885 advertising. The first, the “Trois Petites Ma-mans,” emphasizes youth, innocence, and virginity; these “mamans” have the solemn expressions of childish Madonnas. Just as easily, however, the Three Little Maids can translate into a grotesque blackface version. Their books, slung carelessly, suggest the insouciance of the song itself; their elaborate hats and bouquets belie their tattered clothing, bare feet, and slouching posture. Both show the appeal of this trio, whose ebullient energy and “girlish glee” flaunt a degree of independence and sexual license even while insisting on virginal maidenliness. As Mari Yoshihara suggests, orientalist racial cross-dressing enabled white women to enjoy a measure of liberty that was crucial to the formation of the New Woman: “It was not coincidental that the proliferation of white women’s performances of Asian heroines and the emergence of New Women overlapped. The freedom to cross racial, class, cultural lines—even if it was temporary ‘play’—was part of being ‘modern’ American women, particularly new Women.”87 The first Mikados played up the fine line between an acceptably domesticated form of female allure and a more dangerous disorder, as suggested in Jessie Bond’s story of her oversized obi. The Three Little Maids as performed by white actors are granted the safety of youthful white female allure even while evoking racial typecasting of Japanese women as erotic geisha. African American performers, however, are seen to embody a transgressive sexuality of their own that makes the eroticism unmistakable.

These illustrations make clear how easily the types created by the opera translated into minstrel parody as well as idealized image, into Topsy as well as Little Eva. Perhaps this contrast is not unexpected; Karen Sánchez-Eppler describes the topsy-turvy doll widely popular in the nineteenth-century United States, which presented “two dolls in one: when the long skirts of the elegant white girl are flipped over her head, where her feet should be there grins instead the stereotyped image of a wide-eyed pickaninny.” This doll, missing pelvis and legs, reveals a familiar relationship of race and gender whereby white and black femininity are tied together: “the sexual fears and desires of the white woman are figured on the body of the black, while the black woman presents her sexual experience in the terms sanctioned by white models of feminine decorum.”88 What is Japanese about the three maids seems to do a kind of vanishing act to reveal a more familiar American preoccupation, whereby virginal Madonnas easily become the incorrigible and unruly children of blackface minstrelsy.

Through tracing this shared history of blackface and yellowface, we have seen how through performing The Mikado African Americans gained the privileges and freedom of yellowface impersonation, successfully transforming themselves into versions of the opera’s spectacular Japanese. But perhaps they could do so only because what is Japanese is by no means racially neutral but is already marked as bearing some affinity to the deviance and primitivism of blackness. Thus The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado are vehicles in which audiences might see African American performers as both successfully integrated yet still indelibly confined to essential notions of blackness.

The myriad black versions of The Mikado that have since emerged demonstrate a continuing relationship between yellowface and blackface minstrelsy. In these Mikados, the former is never reworked without the latter’s close proximity; the opera’s complex racial presentation of Japanese holds the door open for blackness as well. There have been multiple attempts to reproduce the commercial success of The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado with other black versions of Gilbert and Sullivan, including a 1940 “tropical” Pinafore, performed by an African American cast. At least according to its Time magazine reviewer at least, this version fell short of its Mikado forebears. Set in “a banana-bright Caribbean isle,” it opened “with a jungle chant that Sullivan neglected to write” and “burst into syncopation when a huge, black, big-bosomed Little Buttercup appeared, called Dick Deadeye picklepuss and shaking her gargantuan hips.” In spite of its jazzed-up score, “gone-native” setting, and “singing that not only the Swing Mikado, but even the D’Oyly Carters, might envy,” the disappointed reviewer finds that the production registered “little of the genuine high spirits that lifted The Swing Mikado high off its feet” and “went over on its rich husky Negro singing rather than as a shagging Harlemquinade.”89 Without the workings of yellowface already in place, these versions of Gilbert and Sullivan productions are clearly seen as lacking.

Minstrelsy continues to haunt black versions of The Mikado, such as The Black Mikado, which premiered at the Cambridge Theatre in London in 1975, directed by Braham Murray. Reviewers of Black Mikado praised the musical arrangements and choreography; Derek Jewell in the London Times mentions the “soul-rock, reggae, blues, calypso and splendid jazzy touches from the stage band Juice, like the flugelhorn solo in ‘The Sun and I,’” and “the feeling of improvisation and joyous exuberance [that] is there all the time, in the dynamic dancing as well as the music.”90 But these descriptions again suggest that what was exciting about this production was its hot and primitive rhythms; here blackness might serve as the curative for a staid Victorian culture obsessed with cold oriental objects.

Into the cherry blossoms and frozen peaks of Japan it imports, just as Dionysus himself came into Greece, from an alien place, the maddening sunshine, the drumbeat and the tribal dances of the West Indies, transforming Sullivan’s pleasant teacup tunes with a blaze of colour and life. It is more continuously and rapturously at one with the disturbing and dangerous Thracian god . . . and the flash of the brown arms and legs in its wild dances is electrifying.91

The album cover evokes both blackface and yellowface: a geisha figure with a half-white, half-brown face wears a bone, a Jemima-style kerchief, and chopsticks in her hair.

Recognizing the production’s links to the earlier Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado, Clive Barnes for the New York Times finds:

It is “Carmen Jones” time again. People have tried to stage a black hepped-up version of the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta, where any number of British blacks are revealing to the world that they too have natural rhythm. Perhaps my antagonism to the piece can at least in part be attributed to my dislike, bordering headily on hatred, for Gilbert and Sullivan as such. But possibly Savoyards would be more turned off by this jokily travestied version than ordinary people. Who can tell?

One thing that certainly makes this one of the hits of London is the playing of the cast. Whether or not one thinks this “Black Mikado” worth doing, it must be admitted that it is being done superlatively well. Derek Griffiths is resourcefully witty as Ko-Ko, and Michael Denison reveals an easy, lazy style as Pooh-Bah. But—oh dear—does one really have to produce Gilbert and Sullivan as an alternative for a musical theater? Even in blackface?92

Ultimately the Swing Mikado and Hot Mikado revealed a range of spectators who valued these productions for different reasons, and whose understanding of what is Japanese about The Mikado seems to be subsumed under other racial agendas. For many, the worth of these productions was not reducible to the primitive stereotypes that entranced so many of the reviewers. In contrast, many affirm that through these productions a kind of racial progress—at least in the form of the recognition of African Americans as performers in the larger sphere—was being made. Alain Locke notes Swing Mikado, along with Federal Theatre Project’s Voodoo Macbeth (1936), directed by Orson Welles and set in Haiti, was “refreshing and revealing Negro versions of familiar classics” that to him manifested what he called “the compound gain of the distinctive cultural hybrid” and the “experimental ventures of the powerful appeal of Negro idioms in dignified and unstereotyped contexts.”93 It is this kind of experimentation that for Locke pushes African American art beyond the “romantic and jazz exoticism” that made Harlem a “fashionable fad” or the “subservient imitativeness” of more general trends in contemporary American art and literature such as aestheticism, realism, regionalism, or proletarianism.94 More recently, Susan Gubar celebrates, “Such exuberant transformations of white scripts redefine the color line that W. E. B. Du Bois saw as the central problem of the twentieth century as an inspiring opportunity for aesthetic innovation.”95 Rena Fraden gives a more guarded assessment:

Clearly the Swing Mikado’s cast cannot be said to have exploded the song and dance discourse that surrounded them then. But in the tentative groping to an identity as a unit, perhaps (who knows?) one actor of two may have stepped from behind the screen of minstrelsy to some other part history hasn’t recorded for us. And certainly it is also possible to read this episode deliberately (as I have tried to do here at the end) as a self-conscious attempt to call attention to the artifice of their role, forcing an audience or a reader to consider the boundaries of propriety, property, the appropriate, which, if not exactly revolutionary, may be a liberation of sorts—if not then, then now.96

The appearance of African American performers certainly did leave room for the expression, however momentary, of more barbed political sentiments. A questioning of the overall social status of African Americans could be tucked into performances of The Hot Mikado, such as in this moment where Bill Robinson as Ko-Ko makes his list:

There’s the Radio Comedian

Whose jokes are thick with mold

And the Glamour Girl of Sixty

Who refuses to grow old

All Men who start each statement with

“Now I’m not prejudiced.”

I’ve got them on my list.

They’ll none of them be missed.97

Finally, productions did provide a way for two large casts of African American performers to find work, even a measure of success, in a field that was otherwise tightly circumscribed even in more prosperous times. There were few alternatives to the minstrel stage. For experienced performers such as Bill Robinson or Maurice Ellis, these productions confirmed their ability to enter into a range of classic roles. For younger performers, such as tap dancer Cholly Atkins, it was a practical choice and provided a stable environment in which to refine abilities for the future. Atkins describes his mixed reaction when he was asked to replace a dancer at the 1939 World Fair production of The Hot Mikado:

I spoke with Chink Lee, captain of the Cotton Club Boys, and he arranged for me to go out to Queens and watch the show for a couple of nights. Then Honi (Coles) and I talked it over again. He said, “These guys are not the greatest dancers in the world, but they get a lot of gigs and it will keep you busy until you find something else to do.” That’s pretty much the way I was thinking about it, too, so I decided I’d definitely give it a shot.

After all, it was a stable job and would at least put some bread on the table. I went in, rehearsed with them a couple of days, tried on the new costumes and everything. That’s all it took.98

Atkins’s pragmatic approach to the job has little to do with its being a breakthrough role or even an artistic challenge. He recalls that the “Lindy Hoppers had some real wonderful spots in the Hot Mikado,” including the “Three Little Maids,” where, dressed “in yellow tights and light green jackets,” “The Cotton Club Boys played the wandering minstrel band. Our dances were all tap routines—different wardrobes, different sets, different music, but all tap.” Still, Atkins concludes, “Although the musical arrangements were fabulous, the choreography was pretty elementary.”99 During the tour of The Hot Mikado, he uses the opportunity to develop alternatives for the future:

On tour at the beginning of 1940 I could see that the Cotton Club Boys had a lot of real talent mixed up in there, so early on I started planting the seeds that would change them into a real act. Let’s face it, there were not too many Broadway shows that black dancers could get into, so I was starting to think about how we could prepare ourselves for other performance options, like appearances with jazz bands.

I said to the guys, “Look, we could be great and we could get a lot of work, but we’re going to have to do more interesting things.” Periodically, I would hold rehearsal sessions when we went into a city for two or three weeks during the Hot Mikado tour. These were not mandatory all the time, but we did a lot of rehearsing, getting things in shape to build a better act.100

What is clear from Atkins’s account and others is that these African American Mikados were important stepping-stones to a future career.

However, in the face of acclaim for African American performers, the discussion of yellowface tends to drop out. Instead, The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado in particular are often used to claim a kind of universality for the opera, whereby the African American performance of it confirms its status as a classic and negates any charges of racism against the Japanese.

The Mikado occupies a space of particular racial sensitivity within the Gilbert and Sullivan oeuvre. Part of the interest in redoing The Mikado lies in redeeming it from its suspect racial representations of Japan and resetting it as an African American opera comes from an inherent awareness of its racism. Such versions seem to promise an escape from the pitfalls of the representations of Japan, not only through casting African American performers as Japanese characters but in billing this change as triumphant racial uplift. In other words, the inherent racism of The Mikado toward the Japanese can be erased because these productions demonstrate the democratic staging of the opera for African American visibility. These versions both establish a difference from the D’Oyly Carte authorized versions (to make a case for artistic freedom) and reinterpret the opera’s racial politics in order to re-inflect it as a black performance. Both are related, promising a break from the opera’s Victorian past toward a new multicultural future whose locus is the United States. In other words, such productions reposition the opera, moving it from a Victorian England obsessed with a consumable Japan to a United States actively working to solve its racial problems. These new versions of The Mikado carry with them the hope that the performance of artistic classics, far from being the property of a cultural elite, might provide a place of common access in a multicultural society. However, this reinvention of The Mikado is enabled by the very logic of commodity racism that we saw earlier, a dynamic of consumption in which what is Japanese is simply a style, an invention, an act without consequences. These swinging Mikados only become an invitation for all races to participate more equally in the pleasurable masking of yellowface.