Review: Union Aveune's "Mikado" is a gem in a mismatched setting

Act I finale

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Union Avenue Opera is kicking off its season with a sparkling production of Gilbert and Sullivan's venerable comic operetta The Mikado featuring superb singing, solid comic acting, and eye-pleasing sets and costumes. As a bit of a G&S purist I have a few issues with Eric Gibson's direction, but they pale in comparison to the sheer entertainment value of the show as a whole.

The cast, to begin with, is consistently strong, all the way down to the smallest roles. As Nanki-Poo, the royal heir disguised as a Second Trombone, tenor Drake Dantzler could hardly be better, with a light, fluid voice that allows him to tune his supple song to perfection. His beloved Yum-Yum is soprano Karina Brazas, also gifted with a wonderfully flexible voice and a fine comic sense.

L-R: E. Scott Levin, Elise LaBarge, Andy Papas
Zachary James

Baritone Andy Papas is a frenetically comic Ko-Ko, the “cheap tailor” raised to the exulted post of Lord High Executioner despite the fact that he literally wouldn't hurt a fly. He, too, has a rich, powerful voice-something you don't often hear in the "principal actor" roles in Gilbert and Sullivan. When he joins with Mr. Dantzler and Ms. Brazas in trios like "Here's a how-de-do" and "The flowers that bloom in the spring,” the vocal blend is lovely.

Resplendent in a flowing red-and-black gown, mezzo Melissa Parks cuts a commanding figure as Katisha, the "most unattractive old thing / with a caricature of a face" whose unwelcome attentions drove Nanki-Poo to flee the Mikado's court. She makes the character's frankly unnecessary Act II aria "Alone, and yet alive" more interesting than it sometimes is and she's appropriately formidable in "There is beauty in the bellow of the blast,” her duet with the hapless Ko-Ko, who has to woo her in order to save himself from a lingering death involving boiling oil. Or is it melted lead?

Melissa Parks

The title role of the Mikado isn't large. He has only two songs and the second one ("See how the fates") is often cut, as it is in this production. But bass Zachary James, who created the role of Lurch in The Addams Family on Broadway, turns his one number, "A more human Mikado,” into a real show stopper, complete with minimal but effective choreography. And that's despite being hampered with a hat that partially obscured his face.

Bass-baritone E. Scott Levin gets what is, for my money, the plum role of the snobbish Poo-Bah, the Lord High Everything Else whose family pride is “something inconceivable.” In his capable hands the character is hilariously stuffy and his solid voice handles the florid "long life to you" toast at the end of Act I with ease. Baritone Nicholas Ward, meanwhile, makes an impressive UAOT debut as Pish-Tush, providing a solid vocal anchor in "Brightly dawns the wedding day.”

Sopranos Gina Malone and Elise LaBarge are Peep-Bo and Pitti-Sing, Yum-Yum's school chums. They're both appropriately winning and Ms. LaBarge does a particularly nice job with her part of "The criminal cried," the trio in which she, Pooh-Bah, and Ko-Ko each provide self-congratulatory and wholly fictional accounts of the execution of Nanki-Poo.

The chorus is small but sings with great clarity. I don't see a chorus master credited, so I have to assume conductor Scott Schoonover gets credit for that.

Stage Director Eric Gibson is, for my taste, a bit too fond of noisy slapstick that sometimes overwhelms Gilbert's verbal humor. And while it's customary to replace the more dated jokes in the "list" songs of Ko-Ko and the Mikado, I think replacing nearly every word is a bit hubristic.

Act II finale

That said, he gets the important stuff right. He moves the show along at a good clip and his blocking is clear, focused, and character-driven. That's not always the case on the operatic stage, so it deserves praise.

I'm less persuaded by his visual design choices. Inspired by Jonathan Miller's somewhat controversial 1986 production for the English National Opera, which moved the action from Gilbert's colorful cartoon Japan to an English seaside resort in the 1920s, he and his designers have placed this Mikado in a "1920s cocktail hour at an English gentleman's club."

That allows Jeff Behm to create a two-level set that's visually striking, with realistic wood paneling, warm sconce lights, and even a chandelier, and Teresa Doggett's period costumes are ideally suited to their characters. It even allowed Mr. Gibson to create a nice little moment by turning that disposable second act aria of Katisha's into a torch song delivered to a handsome young bartender, who hands her a sympathetic martini at the end.

L-R: E. Scott Levin, Andy Papas, Nicholas Ward

None of this, however, has anything much to do with the music or text, so it ultimately amounts to an attractive distraction. For what it's worth, I don't think it worked all that well when Miller did it, either.

On the purely musical side, Mr. Schoonover conducts his 19-piece orchestra in an expertly played and well thought out account of Sullivan's irresistible score. He took a number of optional cuts, which is fine, but I do wish he had left the charming overture intact. He deleted the entire middle section of it, as he did with last November's Yeoman of the Guard at Winter Opera. In neither case could it be considered an improvement.

But these are ultimately minor complaints of the sort which, frankly, matter mostly to G&S devotees. They certainly aren't important enough to spoil this very polished and tremendously entertaining take on one of the classics of comic operetta. Union Avenue Opera's production of The Mikado continues through July 16th at the Union Avenue Christian Church at Union and Enright in the Central West End.

Oh, modified rapture!

Katisha (Lindsey Anderson) fails to blow Nanki-Poo's (Isaiah Bell)
cover in the Act I finale of The Mikado

Who: Winter Opera St. Louis
What: The Mikado
When: November 9 and 11, 2012
Where: The Skip Viragh Center

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I have a friend who says he loves directing Shakespeare because it’s so easy to do. Just don’t get in the playwright’s way and you can’t lose. I think the same could be said of the better Gilbert and Sullivan operettas as well. Don’t mess with G&S and you’re golden.

Winter Opera’s Mikado (presented November 9 and 11 at the Skip Viragh Center on the Chaminade campus) does, unfortunately, mess with G&S from time to time. But the tinkering is infrequent enough and light enough to let the jolly good fun of Gilbert’s wit and Sullivan’s delightful score shine through. This wasn’t a great Mikado, but it was a very fine one. If you’re a dedicated Savoyard (like yours truly) I hope you didn’t miss it.

Let’s talk about the good stuff first. The cast was consistently strong, and some performances were downright outstanding. Mezzo Lindsey Anderson, for example, may be too pretty for Katisha (“a most unattractive old thing / With a caricature of a face”) but behind that stylized makeup you wouldn’t have known it, and she sang and acted the role beautifully. Granted, Katisha doesn’t do much, but it takes a good actress to make her (frankly) unnecessary Act II aria interesting. Ms. Anderson certainly did that. Soprano Kathleen Jasinskas was a comic charmer as Katisha’s nemesis, Yum-Yum, beloved of “wandering minstrel” and royal heir Nanki-Poo, sung with equal charm by tenor Isaiah Bell.

Baritone Lane Johnson had the Principal Comedian role of Ko-Ko, the “cheap tailor” raised to the exulted post of Lord High Executioner despite the fact that he literally wouldn't hurt a fly. He’s gotten rave reviews for previous performances of the part elsewhere, and it’s not hard to see why: a solid voice and impeccable comic timing. Bass-baritone Edward Hanlon was an engaging Pish-Tush, making this minor character more interesting than is sometimes the case. Director John Stephens (who also sang the role of the Mikado with great relish) gave him a little romantic subplot with Pitti-Sing (local mezzo Erin Haupt in another charmer of a performance). It wasn’t strictly Gilbertian, but it worked.

Baritone Gary Moss was presumably down at the bottom of his tessitura for in the bass role of the snobbish Poo-Bah, the Lord High Everything Else whose family pride is “something inconceivable”, but you’d not have known it from his singing. His performance involved a bit too much mugging and physical business for my taste—the big joke about Poo-Bah, after all, is his stolid pomposity—but it certainly went down well with the audience. It was also in sync with Mr. Stephens’s direction, which tended to bit too loaded with shtick at times, so I expect my real gripe was with him rather than Mr. Moss.

Then there’s the matter of the updated lyrics. It has been customary for many years now to replace Gilbert’s dated (and occasionally racist) topical jokes with contemporary equivalents, especially in Ko-Ko’s "As some day it may happen" and the Mikado’s "A more humane Mikado". Most of the revisions worked pretty well, with the Mikado’s song getting some especially clever revisions that left the bulk of the lyrics intact. There were a few too many political and sports jokes for me, but that’s just a matter of individual taste. They all went over well with the audience.

I also thought it was a shame that "See how the fates their gifts allot" got cut from Act II, but if you must cut something, that’s probably the best bet.

The chorus was smallish (eight men and eight women) but it sounded big, and elocution was good enough to make the projected English text unnecessary. The orchestra sounded impressive as well under conductor Michael Mishra, although his tempi were sometimes plodding. With smaller opera companies, the band sometimes suffers from anemic violins and sloppy winds, but there was none of that here. The fact that the Viragh Center has an actual orchestra pit also eliminated some of the balance problems you sometimes encounter in performance spaces that weren’t designed with musical theatre in mind.

In fact, the Viragh Center (on the Chaminade campus in Frontenac) might just be one of the best opera spaces in town. The stage is large and deep, sight lines are good, and the seating is comfortable. The move there has raised Winter Opera’s costs, but if they can manage to make this work they will be serious players on the local musical theatre scene.

The production looked as good as it sounded, with bright cartoonish sets from Scott Loebl, colorful Japanese costumes by JC Krajicek, and effective lighting by Sean Savoie.

So, while my rapture over this Mikado was somewhat modified, there’s no denying it was an entertaining piece of work and very welcome in a town that doesn’t see many Gilbert and Sullivan productions since Opera Theatre dropped their annual G&S show at the Edison Theatre many years ago. Winter Opera’s season continues with Douglas Moore’s The Ballad of Baby Doe (a work I haven’t seen in decades) in February and Puccini’s Tosca in March. There’s also a Holidays on the Hill program in December at Dominic’s Restaurant on (naturally) The Hill. For more information: winteroperastl.org.