“Meditations on The Mikado” in “The Japan of Pure Invention”
Introduction
Meditations on The Mikado
By their strange arts and devices and manner of life, these chosen representatives of a remote race soon attracted all London. Society hastened to be Japanned, just as a few years ago Society had been aestheticised. The Lily, after a brief reign, had been deposed; it was now the turn of the Chrysanthemum to usurp the rightful throne of the English Rose.
François Cellier and Cunningham Bridgeman, Gilbert and Sullivan and Their Operas
François Cellier, resident conductor of the Gilbert and Sullivan operas at the Opera Comique and then at the Savoy Theatre, gives a triumphant account of how William Schwenck Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan’s The Mikado, or The Town of Titipu conquered late Victorian British society. His account of both the opera’s origins and his celebration of its success point us toward the peculiar racial history of this opera, a history that is sometimes obscured by its humor. In the second act of the opera, the Mikado declares his intention to find suitably humiliating punishments for social offenders.
And make each prisoner pent
Unwillingly represent
A source of innocent merriment!
His song transforms different wrongdoers, such as “prosy dull society sinners, / Who chatter and bleat and bore,” the “amateur tenor, whose vocal villainies / All desire to shirk,” “the advertising quack,” or “the billiard sharp,” into objects of fun and derision.1 Productions of Gilbert and Sullivan’s famous opera, so pleasing to the eye and ear, likewise hide a more serious side.
Figure 1. Caricature of W. S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan by E. J. Wheeler in Punch, March 28, 1885.
There have been other scholarly studies of The Mikado, many of them devoted to placing the opera within the context of Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaboration. My book departs from this critical work in significant ways. My primary interest is in how the long history of The Mikado says something about racial perception: how it creates particular fantasies, draws audience members into them, makes them a part of our everyday lives, and weaves them into our unconscious and conscious memories. For countless people who had never been to Japan, never met anyone of Japanese descent, or never seen or heard anything of Japanese culture (as well as for many who had done all of those things), The Mikado served as the basis of knowledge of what “Japanese” meant.
In this, The Mikado is no different from a host of other operas, plays, or stories that bring to life a vision of the Orient. But it is the manner in which the “oriental” is imagined and performed that seems to distinguish The Mikado. The opera brings into being a fantasy of Japan that easily out performs the real country, linking a fantastical Titipu with Japan as imagined nearly a century later by Roland Barthes in his Empire of Signs. Barthes describes Japan as a “fictive nation,” the contact with which produces a crisis of meaning that moves him away from any attempts to represent Japan or its people.
I am not lovingly gazing toward an Oriental essence—to me the Orient is a matter of indifference, merely providing a reserve of features whose manipulation—whose invented interplay—allows me to “entertain” the idea of an unheard-of symbolic system, one altogether detached from our own.2
What is striking about Barthes’s statement is not only his suppression of any “Oriental essence” in favor of a fiction of Japan, but his stated “in-difference,” a casting-off of any responsibility in order to encourage a sense of play without anxiety, compunction, or guilt.
Figure 2 captures how both the fantasy and the indifference have become common practice, as has The Mikado’s practice of yellowface: the playing of Asian characters by white performers. Two children stand gravely, one wearing a robe vaguely reminiscent of a kimono and carrying a fan, the other with a parasol in a mandarin-collared shirt and coolie hat. Their images, so grave and yet so playful, seem to exemplify how the practices of racial disguise initiated by this opera might seem absolutely innocent. The Mikado’s racial mimicry is seemingly without the malice or virulence that so often accompanies other fantasies of the Orient. Clearly the characterizations of The Mikado, at least at first glance, occupy a different place from other instances of racial typecasting: the debased coolie, the threatening gook, the tragic butterfly, or the frightening Fu Manchu.3 The Japan of The Mikado seems charmingly exotic, and its inhabitants—Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo, Pooh-Bah, Ko-Ko, and their compatriots—picturesquely appealing. Even the familiar figure of the despotic Emperor, as channeled through the Mikado, seems whimsically ridiculous rather than evil.
Figure 2. Middletown, New York, Arthur Fanshon and Edward Phillips Nickinson in a production of The Mikado, circa 1896. Photograph courtesy of Mary Glen Chitty.
The longstanding popularity of The Mikado reflects the endurance of this brand of yellowface performance. Counting the 1871 extravaganza Thespis, The Mikado was Gilbert and Sullivan’s ninth collaboration, the seventh of their collaborations to be produced by Richard D’Oyly Carte at his Savoy Theater. Since initial production of The Mikado in London on March 14, 1885, its popularity in Great Britain, the United States, and other countries has been unprecedented. It is still a staple of amateur performances as well as regularly revived on the main stages of professional opera companies. It is performed by children, by high school and college students, by puppets, and in the military.4 It merited the first electric recording of a Gilbert and Sullivan opera in 1926, as well as the first LP recording in 1949. Its 1939 film version, directed by Victor Schertzinger, made it the first complete Gilbert and Sullivan opera filmed for the screen. Film and television celebrities have graced its performances; Groucho Marx starred as Ko-Ko in an hour-long version broadcast on the Bell Telephone Hour in 1960, and Kukla, Fran, and Ollie sang a discordant “Three Little Maids” on television in the early 1950s, setting the precedent for a myriad of references in popular culture and advertising. Given this popularity, it is perhaps not surprising that a closer examination of the opera’s long history is overdue; my particular approach to telling the story of The Mikado, however, requires more explanation.
Why The Mikado?
One winter day in 2004, on an electronic discussion list for Asian American theater, I came across a brief but intriguing posting that included a link to photos from the 2004 New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players production of The Mikado. The photographs showed smiling women in colorful kimonos, their hair piled elaborately on their heads, and a man with a Fu Manchu mustache and impossibly long fingernails, grimacing in ways that made his exaggerated eye makeup seem even more demonic. These white performers in geisha and evil-emperor dress looked like relics from long ago, but they were obviously alive and well.
The posting asked: “is this yellowface production offensive or not? if so, any plans of attack? where are the starving asian actors instead of using yellowface?”5 I eagerly scanned the postings on the list for some days after, hoping to hear some news of an actual protest (after all, the highly publicized protests against the casting of Jonathan Pryce as a Eurasian character in Miss Saigon had not happened that long ago).6 But no record of any protest materialized. I was left pondering the posting’s initial question as well as contemplating its consciousness-raising aims. Enticed by the questions raised by the many and various productions that stretched almost continuously from 1885 to the present, I decided that I needed to think more deeply about the complex history of this opera.
Why The Mikado? Like Giacomo Puccini’s Madame Butterfly, this opera regularly graces stages throughout North America and Europe, pleasing audiences with a patently nonsensical vision of Japan. With some notable exceptions, most productions use white performers instead of “starving asian actors,” yet these productions arouse little attention or concerted public criticism. What about The Mikado allows the opera to maintain such popularity? Is this yellowface production offensive or not? The many fans of the opera might protest that it is not offensive in the least but rather innocent merriment; they claim that the opera pokes fun at Victorian England rather than Meiji Japan or that it is a positive, even admiring, tribute to Japanese culture.
Both these claims of offensiveness and innocence are related to how The Mikado presents racial difference. I say “racial” rather than “national” or “ethnic” because the opera’s vision of Japan has so much to say about the larger categories and social hierarchies of race, with all its attendant assumptions about biology, bodies, and nature. Productions of the opera draw on what is assumed to be the inherent nature of the Japanese—whether positive (quaint, exotic) or negative (primitive, untrustworthy) or both (undecipherable, foreign)—in images that echo broader ideas of oriental difference. Different productions often reflect the ethnic confusion that is characteristic of broader racial groupings; from the opera’s inception, those familiar with Japan noticed that its depictions routinely confused Japanese with other Asian cultures. Its persistent employment of yellow-face also marks its involvement with the dynamics of an impersonation that we understand as cross-racial as well as cross-ethnic or cross-cultural.
Thus productions of The Mikado afford us ample opportunity to study how race is imagined and performed throughout its long history. This book covers over a century of Mikado productions, tracing through them both the changing and often conflicting racial dynamics in England and America and the ways that racial representations persist and mutate over time. I do not pretend to provide a thorough chronological survey of Mikado production. In examining these aspects of The Mikado’s racial history, I can but touch on a few examples from the long catalogue of productions, most of them from England and the United States, with a later chapter on the opera’s production in Japan. These are organized by questions that address both the opera’s various depictions of what is Japanese and the nature of racial perception and performance. I hope to use the production history of the opera to describe different racial images, modes of performance, and attitudes.
These do not occur in chronological succession but rather are layered on top of one another, just as productions running concurrently can demonstrate different, even contradictory, racial attitudes. Productions that nostalgically echo the 1885 D’Oyly Carte version might be mounted in the same year as intercultural versions combining kimonos with nineteenth-century Victorian dress, and one might attend a jazzy, multicultural Hot Mikado in the same season. The Mikado demonstrates a long history of racial sedimentation. As Thomas Holt suggests, old and new performances of race do not effectively replace one another, but over time are fused onto one another:
A new historical construct is never entirely new and the old is never entirely supplanted by the new. Rather the new is grafted onto the old. Thus racism, too, is never entirely new. Shards and fragments of its past incarnations are embedded in the new. Or, if we switch metaphors to an archeological image, the new is sedimented onto the old, which occasionally seeps or bursts through.7
Whether an image of a living grafted plant, a now-dead fossil, or a multilayered rock, these metaphors point to the dynamic negotiation and management of race. They are particularly useful in describing the long history of The Mikado, in which racial representations are revealed in a range of forms, types, and practices that arise out of a specific cultural moment but are then relentlessly reactivated in subsequent productions.
The racial meanings of the opera change not only with time but also with location. The Mikado was begotten in England but soon made its way to the United States where it took on its own unique life. Throughout the book, some of the most significant examples are of American productions. While The Mikado was certainly a sparkling success in England, arguably it became even more of a popular phenomenon in the United States. One reason is simply that there were many more productions in the United States, where companies took great advantage of Gilbert, Sullivan, and D’Oyly Carte’s failed attempts to maintain copyright protections over their works. Whereas in the U.K. and many other parts of the world, D’Oyly Carte and his heirs maintained an exclusive control over the production of The Mikado until 1962, across the Atlantic many different versions came to life. Though the New York performances were undoubtedly much like those in London (Gilbert, Sullivan, and D’Oyly Carte all traveled to New York for the opera’s 1885 premiere in order to impose their stamp on the performance), there were striking variations, some of which eventually made their way, post-1962, back to England.
Inevitably, this proliferation also suggests a sea change in how the opera stages race differently in British and American contexts. Both British and American artists and consumers, like their French counterparts a decade earlier, were captivated in the 1870s and 1880s by Japanese arts and artifacts, and The Mikado is formulated, as we shall see, within the context of this more widespread Japan craze. However, the opera’s imagining and reimagining of Japan, particularly as suggested in later productions, clearly takes on different shapes in England and the United States. In England, the opera’s production and reception were shaped both by specific cultural and political relationships with Japan and by a broader understanding of oriental races underscored by England’s role as an empire with colonies in India and the Middle East. The United States, with its mid-nineteenth-century opening and mid-twentieth-century occupation of Japan, clearly imposed on versions of the opera its own understanding of what it meant to play Japanese. It staged The Mikado in ways that reflected its own distinctive preoccupations in terms of foreign relations, Asian immigration, and history of slavery, segregation, and racial formation.
Scholarly attention to The Mikado has come from multiple perspectives. The Mikado is often mentioned in studies of the nineteenth-century Japan craze in Europe and the United States as one of many examples of music, painting, literature, architecture, decorative arts, and design that reflected an interest in Japan. As a work that straddles the porous boundary between art and popular entertainment, The Mikado does not usually merit the extended analysis given to more serious influences of Japanese art and culture on the artistic development of Western artists. In discussions of music history, musical theater, and opera, of course, The Mikado fares better. Critical studies reflect the continued popularity of the opera. Unlike some of the orientalist musical theater it spawned, such as Reginald De Koven and Harry B. Smith’s The Begum (1887), J. Cheever Goodwin and Woolson Morse’s Wang (1891), or Sidney Jones’s The Geisha (1896), The Mikado continues to enjoy popularity among contemporary audiences. A number of operas by Western composers and librettists were specifically set in Japan, including Camille Saint-Saens’ La Princesse Jaune (1872), Emil Jonas’s Die Japaneserin (1874), André Messager’s Madame Chrysanthème (1893), and Pietro Mascagni’s Iris (1898). These have by and large fallen into critical and artistic obscurity, while The Mikado and Madame Butterfly have thrived. Of these two, Madame Butterfly currently receives more main-stage productions in major opera houses; The Mikado, however, outstrips Butterfly by far in terms of amateur and semi-professional reincarnations.
Both the tragic Madame Butterfly and The Mikado have been identified as orientalist, but these two musical versions of Japan work quite differently. The Mikado in particular defies charges that it is a racist work. Though its characterizations, setting, and story clearly misrepresent Japan in ways that can be seen as patronizing and insulting, at the same time it is a comic opera that disclaims the seriousness of these representations. This particular quality—and the longevity of the opera itself—gives us an excellent opportunity to examine complexity, distinctiveness, and mutability of racial construction over time and across space.
Overture
This book is organized into three basic sections. Part 1, “1885,” centers around the opera’s debut in 1885. The Mikado can be seen as part of the Japan craze that took hold in Europe and the United States after the opening of Japan to foreign trade in 1853. In chapter 1, “My Objects All Sublime,” I show how The Mikado is an example of what is often called japonaiserie, a term that signals, unlike the alternative term Japonisme, a certain irreverence, whimsy, and lack of authenticity. Both japonaiserie and its much more dignified counterpart, Japonisme, are part of the larger infusion of orientalism into Western decorative arts; for instance, chinoiserie, the popular Western taste for Chinese objects and décor, set the precedent for japonaiserie. Born in the middle of this craze, The Mikado both articulated and significantly refocused the rage for Japanese objets d’art, costumes, décor, and crafts, staging a world inhabited by fanciful characters whose “Japanese” nature is identified primarily in terms of familiar decorative objects such as fans, swords, vases, screens, and china. It popularized an easy way of playing Japanese, an accessible and to some extent transparent racial impersonation that relied on the display and use of objects, songs, and gestures of the opera.
These initial Mikado productions bring into relief the relationship between race and commodity fetishism that Anne McClintock has called “commodity racism.” McClintock notes that images in advertising and other media could far surpass scientific discourse in their promotion of racial messages:
Imperial kitsch as consumer spectacle, by contrast, could package, market and distribute evolutionary racism on a hitherto unimagined scale. No preexisting form of organized racism had ever before been able to reach so large and so differentiated a mass of the populace.8
The allure of the commodity racism felt in these first Mikados was potent indeed. The opera is a prime example of how the understanding of racial difference can be shaped by the interaction of consumers and goods rather than by experiences of body contact. The Mikado’s extraordinary power to define what was Japanese harnessed the energies of the Japan craze but also changed its dynamics by placing familiar things into an engaging story filled with beautiful music. In a sense, it not only gave these objects new life but also made them sing.
Ultimately, this form of racial performance eroded the responsibility to represent Japanese people or culture in factual ways. The first Mikado productions simplified a complicated relationship with the real Japan, turning the Japan craze into a Mikado craze. Images and music from The Mikado became a ubiquitous part of British and American households, spreading the practice of yellowface from the stage to to the parlor. The Mikado popularized a mode of playing in which the pleasure of owning Japanese commodities was magnified by an active engagement in racial impersonation. Not only could one collect beautiful objects of a fantasy Japan, one could even inhabit this world, complete with a story and a musical score. Audiences could escape into an attractive vision of the Orient by viewing the opera and by performing their own versions of the opera through singing songs, taking photographs, or building Mikado rooms. In each instance, each act of racial transformation remained light rather than serious, relying on the possession and display of Japanese objects rather than on a more informed imitation. This even further eroded the sense of The Mikado as a mode of racial representation, abandoning any responsibility toward a real people in favor of a world of pure invention.
Yet this fantasy was not impervious. There is a characteristic tension in the history of the opera: at times The Mikado makes strategic use of Japanese objects; at other times it denies its own power to represent a real culture and people. Chapter 2, “‘My Artless Japanese Way,’” shows how The Mikado might be juxtaposed with other accounts of Japan—for instance, in the Japanese Native Villages that appeared in the same year as the opera’s debut—to expose inherent anxieties about commodity culture, labor, and bodies. Exhibitions of Japanese artisans at work and other reminders of laboring oriental bodies in these exhibitions made clear the fault lines within commodity racism and revealed precisely what had presumably been erased by the opera’s sparkling success. Still, The Mikado has maintained its charms to the present day through its consistent ability to present a compelling image of Japan as a place of magical objects and pleasurable, even therapeutic, racial play. Chapter 3, “Magical Objects and Therapeutic Yellowface,” examines these legacies of the 1885 Mikado in contemporary productions such as Mike Leigh’s acclaimed 1999 film Topsy-Turvy.
Part 2, “1938–39,” gives a different perspective on racial masquerade by looking at the intertwined histories of The Mikado, blackface minstrelsy, and African American musical theater. Here we consider how race, following Claire Jean Kim’s thought-provoking formulation, might be thought of as triangulated rather than as a binary opposition between whiteness and color. For Kim, different racial groups “become racially marginalized in comparison with one another,” moreover, “they are differently racialized.”9 The Mikado wears this racial triangulation on its sleeve by making overt references to the history of blackface minstrelsy as well as to the practice of yellowface. Song lyrics referring to “the nigger serenader” in The Mikado (excised from productions after 1948) are really part of a much broader shared space of multiple racial impersonations.
The very first productions of The Mikado in the United States inspired a multitude of blackface minstrel parodies and adaptations. These productions complicate how we understand yellowface performance as the domain of white performers whose racial privilege as white was enhanced by their playing of Japanese and other oriental identities. As many Mikado productions by African Americans show us, yellowface was not exclusive to white performers. Chapter 4, “Titipu Comes to America,” resurrects the particular history of performing Japanese by African Americans in hopes of understanding the complex layering of racial representation buried not just in The Mikado but in a much larger history.
Blackface minstrelsy is present even at the very beginning of encounters between modern Japan and the West. Japan’s signing of the treaty by Commodore Matthew Perry was prefaced by a gathering on March 27, 1854, at which Perry and his crew entertained Japanese officials with food, drink, and a blackface minstrel show:
After the banquet, the Japanese were entertained by an exhibition of negro minstrelsy, got up by some of the sailors, who, blacking their faces and dressing themselves in character, enacted their parts with a humor that would have gained them unbounded applause from a New York audience even at Christy’s. The gravity of the saturnine Hayashi was not proof against the grotesque exhibition, and even he joined with the rest in the general hilarity provoked by the farcical antics and humorous performances of the mock negroes. It was now sunset, and the Japanese prepared to depart with quite as much wine in them as they could well bear. The jovial Matsusaki threw his arms about the Commodore’s neck, crushing, in his tipsy embrace, a pair of new epaulettes, and repeating, in Japanese, with maudlin affection, these words, as interpreted into English: “Nippon and America, all the same heart.” He then went toddling into his boat, supported by some of his more steady companions, and soon all the happy party had left the ships and were making rapidly for the shore.10
Within this initial encounter, the dynamics of blackface inform the ambiguous racial status of the Japanese. Perry’s description suggests multiple interpretations of this encounter. Some assumption of diplomatic equality between the Americans and the Japanese is shared in mutual laughter at the antics of blackface ridicule. Laughing at the “farcical antics and humorous performances of the mock negroes” is a way of establishing common ground or understanding “Nippon and America, all the same heart.” At the same time, the description of the drunken Matsusaki suggests another kind of racial spectacle—a Japanese one—that amuses Perry and the other Americans.
This uncertain dynamic of multiple racializations is also at play in the multiple references to blackface minstrelsy and different black productions of The Mikado. What happens when a third racial party becomes involved in what is often presumed to be a binary relationship, what Eric Lott has called “a profound white investment in black culture?”11 Moreover, how is this quintessentially English work, as The Mikado is often deemed, connected to the “peculiarly American structure of racial feeling”12 revealed in blackface? As we have already seen, at times the representation of Japanese echoed the images of primitive energy, sexuality, and debasement so often associated with stereotypes of blackness. Paradoxically, performances of The Mikado, as well as other performances of Japanese, have also been used to claim African American advancement and racial uplift. African American performers, such as the minstrel performer Thomas “Japanese Tommy” Dilward, have long used cross-racial acting to gain some measure of freedom. The limited freedoms given to African American performers, however, are closely circumscribed. This comes through in two of the best-known African American versions of the opera, the 1938–39 Swing Mikado of the Chicago Federal Theatre Project and its 1939 Broadway competitor the Hot Mikado, produced by Michael Todd. These productions were hailed as milestones in the freedom of African Americans to perform a wider range of roles in musical theater, although these productions themselves were rife with stereotypes of minstrelsy and exoticism, sustained by the negrophilia of modernist white America.
The racial history of The Mikado shows that we cannot view orientalism solely as an opposition between white and Asian; neither yellowface nor The Mikado specifically belongs to white performers. The inclusion of African American performers significantly changed the racial dynamics of the opera. The success of the swinging Mikados shows the intricately linked histories of yellowface and blackface and helps to explain the popularity of a much later version of the Hot Mikado to contemporary audiences looking for a more multicultural take on the opera. David Bell and Rob Bowman’s Hot Mikado, with its jazzed-up score and libretto, has had enormous popularity around the English-speaking world since its 1986 premiere at Ford’s Theatre (Washington, D.C.), with runs in London’s West End and other prominent commercial theaters as well as a host of amateur venues; it currently rivals the original version in popularity. Productions of the 1986 Hot Mikado claim their roots in the 1939 Michael Todd version and prominently bill themselves as celebrating the triumph of African American performers, even though most of the performers remain white. In this “cool” version and others, Gilbert and Sullivan’s imagined locale changes from a fantasy Japan to a multicultural America. Through this geographical and musical relocation, Hot Mikado’s racial politics becomes redefined around the jubilant inclusion of African Americans in the American racial landscape, which is projected onto a Japanese setting.
These new Hot Mikados are not the first vision of The Mikado’s Titipu as a multiracial paradise nor the only versions that update the stodgy, Victorian old-world music and language for the liberated rhythms of the new world. Chapter 5, “Titipu Comes to America,” takes a look not only at the newer Hot Mikados but also a now-obscure 1963 film The Cool Mikado, which features a vision of Japan transformed by U.S. occupation and modernization. Though it is jet-age Tokyo that we see on the screen, The Cool Mikado still presents a fantasy of Titipu as an exotic playground in which the newly cosmopolitan and urbane protagonists, both British and American, might freely wander. This film has been deemed “dreadful,” “terrible,” and “bad” even by Gilbert and Sullivan fans;13 yet though artistically embarrassing, it presents a fascinating reminder of how the opera accommodates a changing image of Japan.
Part 3, “Contemporary Mikados,” concentrates on contemporary productions of the opera, all of which confirm that in the present there are many kinds of racial imaginings. What reanimates these contemporary productions of The Mikado is not simply habit or nostalgia (though both undoubtedly play a role in production) but rather an ongoing fascination with staging versions of the Japanese fantasy at the heart of the opera. Some contemporary productions still echo D’Oyly Carte’s Japanese style in costume, setting, gesture, and delivery, using this look to present a nostalgic vision of Victorian England. Others seem to move radically away from the traditional Savoy style, updating these queer and quaint characterizations into images and references that frame Asians as yellow peril, whether as immigrant worker or corporate threat. Both the retro and racist Mikados can show us much about how new cultural productions continue to harbor old racisms. At the same time, this seemingly deathless opera has had a new life that defies the more predictable forms of racial formation. Recent productions and adaptations of the opera performed and directed by Asian American artists suggest alternative directions and new ways of thinking about an opera that continues to attract willing and eager performers. Finally, this book concludes with an examination of the opera’s productions in Japan, which provides perhaps the most robust examples of its complicated racial history.
As I mentioned earlier, it would be impossible to catalog all the types of Mikado productions. Nor is my aim primarily to point out artistic excellence or failure. This little list includes Mikados good and bad, famous and forgotten, critically acclaimed and despised, all singled out primarily as they articulate different contexts for and ways of performing race. Organizing a project of this scope is always a challenge: while it makes sense to focus on key productions that are undoubtedly characteristic of their times—1885, 1938–39, the 1980s and after—the larger racial histories behind this opera move much less linearly and much more erratically. Though the book presents a series of chronologies, its many examples belie this organization. As we shall see, surveying the history of this opera means a constant movement backward and forward in time, as well as the examination of moments in which time seems to stop completely.
A final note before proceeding. Although it tries to get at the heart of what makes The Mikado so popular, this book does not attempt to analyze the enthusiasm of fans for The Mikado and other Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The contemporary aspect of this fandom has been thoroughly documented by Ian Bradley, who writes of “that company of enthusiasts who border on the obsessive, collect G&S memorabilia, write books on the subject, know every nuance of every recording, and sit in theatres waiting for a wrong word in a patter song or a move which deviates from the D’Oyly Carte norm.”14 Although it is by now obvious that I do not write from their perspective, my scholarship is nonetheless now indebted to those fans and their obsessive habits of collecting. Much of the material for this book was available only because they so enthusiastically shared their fascinating documents, facts, and details. In gratitude, I would like to express a hope that my work, despite its rather sober approach, might in fact bridge a certain divide between the fans who continue to produce and attend The Mikado with unabashed enthusiasm and those who protest its production as patently racist. The latter group decries the performances of The Mikado for embodying the living spirit of colonialism and white privilege; the former pooh-poohs these charges of racism (“Can’t they see that The Mikado is really about England, not Japan?”), furiously defending their enjoyment of the work against what they see as the overbearing oppression of political correctness against free artistic expression or old-fashioned fun. I have been asked many times whether my real objective is to prevent the opera from ever having another production. I would say without any false humility that I can’t imagine this book to have that kind of power. Perhaps its best hope is to accompany and enliven future productions of The Mikado with some reminders of its thorny racial history.
Ian Bradley describes the lasting appeal of Gilbert and Sullivan for fans as not only an expression of “nostalgia and patriotism,” but also, and even more significantly, because of its comfort factor:
What I have already called its quality of “divine emollient” could from a less enthusiastic perspective be dismissed as the musical equivalent of comfort food. It is relatively undemanding and serves as an instant pick-me-up, particularly in our disordered and angst-ridden age. Its characters exist in a self-contained, make-believe world where, on the whole, order prevails and virtue is, indeed, triumphant.15
Comfort can be derived both from enjoying and reviling Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular work. However, working through the complexities of The Mikado’s racial history—digging through the multiple layers of its racial sedimentation in order to unearth something of new interest—is a reward and a triumph of a different kind. According to the Web site of Minneapolis’s Gilbert and Sullivan Very Light Opera Company, in 1985 then-mayor Donald M. Fraser declared Minneapolis and the fictitious town of Titipu to be “sister cities.”16 From the sister city then, let us proceed.
Synopsis of The Mikado
The opera opens in the courtyard of Ko-Ko’s palace in Titipu, where a chorus of Japanese nobles is “standing and sitting in attitudes suggested by native drawings” (“If You Want to Know Who We Are”). Nankipoo enters with “a native guitar on his back and a bundle of ballads in his obi.” He identifies himself through his opening song (“A Wandering Minstrel”). He seeks his love, Yum-Yum, having heard that her guardian Ko-Ko, to whom she is betrothed, has been condemned to death for flirting. He learns from Pish-Tush, a noble lord, that Ko-Ko has escaped beheading and been made Lord High Executioner. Pish-Tush relates (“Our Great Mikado, Virtuous Man”) how this was done in order to circumvent the Mikado’s decree that flirting is punishable by death. Ko-Ko was next in line to be executed, but by promoting him from lowly tailor to the exalted rank of Lord High Executioner, no one else can be put to death until Ko-Ko decapitates himself. Pooh-Bah appears and introduces himself as a nobleman of great family pride who has taken on the multiple duties (and salaries) of all the officers of state who resigned when Ko-Ko was put in charge. For a bribe, he reveals to Nanki-Poo that Yum-Yum will be wed to Ko-ko that afternoon (“Young Man, Despair” and “And Have I Journeyed for a Month”). The chorus of nobles herald the appearance of Ko-Ko (“Behold the Lord High Executioner”) who sings of his rise to power and promises to carry out his duties as executioner with appropriate victims (“As Someday It May Happen,” popularly called the “Little List” song). He negotiates plans for his forthcoming wedding with Pooh-Bah in his various capacities.
A chorus of schoolgirls arrives (“Comes a Train of Little Ladies”), followed by Yum-Yum and her sisters Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo (“Three Little Maids”). Yum-Yum greets Ko-Ko reluctantly but gives a warm welcome to Nanki-Poo, who confesses his love and then is taken away. Ko-Ko asks Pooh-Bah to greet the girls appropriately, but he finds this duty painful for a man of his position. The girls respond with laughter and teasing (“So Please You, Sir, We Much Regret”). All exit except for Yum-Yum. She is joined by Nanki-Poo, who tells her of his true identity: he is really the son of the Mikado. He had the misfortune to inadvertently captivate Katisha, an elderly and ugly lady of the court. He was ordered to marry Katisha or face execution for flirting and subsequently fled the court, disguised as a second trombonist. Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum bemoan the laws against flirting and contemplate—through an enactment of kissing and embracing—what they could do romantically if it were not forbidden (“Were You Not to Ko-Ko Plighted”).
Ko-Ko receives a letter from the Mikado that threatens to abolish the position of Lord High Executioner and demote the city of Titipu to the rank of a village unless someone is executed within a month. Ko-Ko, Pooh-Bah, and Pish-Tush consider who might best fit the bill (“I Am So Proud”), and Pooh-Bah points out that Ko-Ko is already next in line. Ko-Ko tries to bemoan his predicament in a soliloquy but is interrupted by the entrance of Nanki-Poo, who is preparing to hang himself out of romantic despair. Nanki-Poo agrees to let Ko-Ko execute him in a month’s time if he can marry Yum-Yum the next day. In the finale of the first act (“With Aspect Stern”), Ko-Ko introduces Nanki-Poo as his volunteer. Congratulations and songs ensue (“The Threatened Cloud Has Passed Away”) until Katisha arrives on the scene (“Your Revels Cease!”). Pitti-Sing taunts her (“Away, nor Prosecute Your Quest,” also known as “For He’s Going to Marry Yum-Yum”). She threatens to reveal Nanki-Poo’s true identity but is drowned out by the crowd, who sings “O ni! Bikkuri shakkuri to!” She leaves, vowing revenge.
Act 2 opens in Ko-Ko’s garden, where Yum-Yum, her sisters, and the ladies’ chorus prepare for her wedding (“Braid the Raven Hair”). She celebrates her own beauty with a solo (“The Sun, Whose Rays,” popularly known as “The Moon and I”), and all seems joyous until she is reminded of Nanki-Poo’s sentence of execution. Nanki-poo enters and tries to cheer everyone up (“Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day”). Ko-Ko enters and informs them of an overlooked aspect of their plan: under the Mikado’s law, when a married man is beheaded, his wife has to be buried alive. Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum are dismayed (“Here’s a How-de-do!”). Nanki-Poo declares his intent to kill himself immediately instead, and Ko-Ko is suddenly left again with the prospect of having to behead himself, even as the Mikado and his entourage are approaching the city. Even when Nanki-Poo offers himself up for immediate execution, Ko-Ko finds that he cannot carry out his official duties. He decides that perhaps he doesn’t really need to kill Nanki-poo after all and that simply producing an affidavit stating that the execution has happened will do. Nanki-Poo agrees provided that he is allowed to marry Yum-Yum anyway, and Pooh-Bah is persuaded by “ready money” to act as the multiple witnesses. Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum leave to be married immediately by Pooh-Bah the Archbishop.
The choruses enter singing (“Miya sama”) and then the Mikado himself, followed by Katisha (“From Every Kind of Man”). The Mikado relates his ideas of governance, which entail finding appropriate punishments for different offenses (“A More Humane Mikado”). He is told of the execution and asks for the delightful details, which Ko-Ko, Pitti-Sing, and Pooh-Bah relate with dramatic intensity (“The Criminal Cried”). The Mikado tells them that he has come to Titipu not to affirm the execution, but in search of his son Nanki-Poo. After Katisha discovers that the executed man on the affidavit is the heir apparent, the Mikado calmly and routinely schedules the punishment (“something humorous but lingering, with either boiling oil or melted lead”) of Ko-Ko, Pitti-Sing, and Pooh-Bah for after lunch. The unfortunate trio bemoan their impending doom (“See How the Fates Their Gifts Allot”) and, after the Mikado and Katisha depart, frantically conclude that they must produce Nanki-Poo in order to save themselves. Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum appear, but Nanki-Poo tells them that since he has just married Yum-Yum, he cannot reveal himself to his father for fear of risking execution for himself and live burial for Yum-Yum. He proposes that Ko-Ko persuade Katisha to marry him in order to mitigate this risk. Ko-Ko reluctantly agrees (“The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring”).
The mourning Katisha sings of the loss of Nanki-Poo (“Alone, and Yet Alive!”). Ko-Ko woos her at first without avail but then captures her heart with the touching ballad of a lovelorn bird who commits suicide (“On a Tree by a River,” popularly known as the “Titwillow” song). Together they celebrate the union of beauty and horror (“There Is Beauty in the Bellow of the Blast”), and when the Mikado returns from lunch, Katisha asks him for mercy for all three culprits. Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum present themselves, and Ko-Ko explains the deception in ways that satisfy the Mikado. All join in a final song and dance (“For He’s Gone and Married Yum-Yum” reprise).
We use cookies to analyze our traffic. Please decide if you are willing to accept cookies from our website. You can change this setting anytime in Privacy Settings.