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John
Farrell Correspondent
for the Press Telegram
'Sizzling 'Mikado' swings into Carpenter
Southern California is the cross-cultural capital of the world. No one even thinks twice about buying doughnuts at a shop that also sells carnitas, barbacoa and $1 Chinese food.
Kosher burritos? You bet. Mexican-style Japanese ramen? Right around the corner.
So when HOT MIKADO opens at the Richard and Karen Carpenter Center for the Performing Arts at Cal State Long Beach Saturday night for three weekends of performances, the show will be right at home, even if it has taken it over 65 years to land in Southern California.
Presented
by Musical Theatre West, HOT MIKADO is just what it sounds like --
a swinging, jazzed-up version of the original "Mikado," the 19th-century
operetta by Sir William Gilbert and Sir Arthur Sullivan that was their greatest
hit and the biggest musical comedy sensation of the Victorian era.
Gilbert set his opera in Imperial Japan, supposedly because he was inspired by a Japanese sword that fell off his wall. More likely, it was because he knew London was undergoing a craze for everything Japanese, and a musical set there would sell. But THE MIKADO, though set in Japan and filled with Japanese references, names and glorious costumes, was really about English morality and satirized the British love of propriety and legality.
Half a century later in New York, producer Mike Todd created HOT MIKADO, taking the G&S musical, retaining its plot, but changing the lyrics to reflect the times and jazzing up the music, adding swing rhythms, blues numbers and an all-black cast headed by Bill "Bojangles" Robinson. The show was still set in Japan, and still featured Gilbert's British satire, plus plenty of jokes about the political situation in 1939 Depression-era New York.
In this HOT MIKADO the music was still Sullivan's, but with a very different beat, and the Mikado himself, the self-important and pompous emperor of Japan, was a tap-dancing monarch.
Todd got his idea from THE SWING MIKADO, which the Federal Theatre Project had created in Chicago. When Todd couldn't buy THE SWING MIKADO, he opened THE HOT MIKADO in New York. The "Swing" version soon followed, and they were different enough to run across the street from each on Broadway.
In 1986, Alliance Theatre Company director David H. Bell wanted to revive THE HOT MIKADO but discovered that what little remained of the original -- a few recordings and incomplete scores -- were mostly just Sullivan's music performed by an all-black cast. So he and arranger/musical director Rob Bowman created their own adaptation, which premiered at Ford's Theatre in Washington, D.C., and then went on to become a huge hit in London's West End.
Now, finally, this cross-cultural musical, about a mythical Japan (which is really England), with the Japanese characters singing in swing time to lyrics about current politics, comes to Southern California for the first time, and it is sure to delight audiences here as it has elsewhere.
"This is a sure-fire hot show," said LaParee Young, who is directing the production that opens Saturday in Long Beach. (It is the sixth production of the show he has directed.)
"The songs have been put into many musical styles -- gospel, jazz, blues, and R&B -- and yet they stay true to the originals. And the production is set in a kind of Cotton Club look, with all the characters in zoot suits.
"It remains true to the original, the Gilbert and Sullivan production from 1885. The show uses the same lyrics, the same music and the same story, only with updates." '
That story, which revolves around a cheap tailor named Ko-Ko, reveals how he has been made the highest officer of government, the Lord High Executioner, because, since he has been condemned to death for flirting (the only capital crime on the books), he can't execute anyone else until he executes himself. But, wanting to please the Mikado, he pretends to execute Nanki-Poo, who turns out to be the son of the Mikado, disguised because he has been accused of flirting with Kati-Shaw, an ugly old woman from his father's court.
All that is as Gilbert planned it, but the music moves to rhythms that Sullivan probably never heard, and the Mikado enters in a tap-dancing routine that stops the show. "Wait until you see this number," Young said.
"There is something for everyone in this show -- dance, song, spectacular costumes. It is a show for everyone in the family," Young said. And, or so it sounds, just the kind of cultural mix that L.A. is used to.
John
Farrell is a Los Angeles freelance writer.
2/20/04
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