Here is my Tuesday December 7 suntimes.com and Wednesday December 8 Chicago Sun-Times review of the Monday December 6, 2010 opening night of Lyric Opera of Chicago's new production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.
Katisha (Stephanie Blythe, right) embraces Nanki-Poo (Toby Spence) as Pitti-Sing (Katharine Goeldner) looks on in Lyric Opera’s production of The Mikado. | John J. Kim/Chicago Sun-Times
Odd choices can’t sink Lyric's superbly cast ‘Mikado’
BY ANDREW PATNER
RECOMMENDED
Through January 21, 2011
Lyric Opera of Chicago scores many points in its new production of Gilbert and Sullivan’s deservedly most popular work, The Mikado, which opened Monday at the Civic Opera House. But it does so in a way that is oddly bifurcated between sound and sight.
Musically, this Mikado comes close to perfection, with Lyric’s Andrew Davis leading a full orchestra and top-tier performers (including three veteran British leads) in a rich presentation of Arthur Sullivan's 1885 score well above the level that one would hear from a devoted but smaller G&S company. (Davis was given a surprise post-show serenade of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow” by cast, orchestra, and audience to mark his ten years as music director.)
While Chicago-based director Gary Griffin’s focus on individual characters supports some fine performances and makes for some effective scenes, his decision, along with British set and costume designer Mark Thompson, to de-emphasize the work’s Victorian English “Japonism” sometimes takes the air out of the creators’ intentional tensions and contradictions between perceptions of East and West.
There’s nothing wrong with shifting the time setting or dispensing with the historic D’Oyly Carte designs, which were themselves wittily updated in the 1920s. Lyric’s first Mikado, the 1983 Peter Sellars production, which took place very much in the here and now, remains one of the most memorable shows at Lyric or of any G&S. But Griffin and Thompson, by trying to show us the effects of Meiji-era Japanese fascination with the West, get things, well, topsy-turvy, as Mike Leigh titled his brilliant 1999 film about the birth of The Mikado. How are we to feel the satire of having recognizable British characters under those kimonos if they are dressed as . . . British characters? Certainly no one was going to change Sullivan’s occasional use of black-key pentatonic pseudo-Japanese music or W.S. Gilbert’s use of real and imagined Japanese words and names. These choices just seem odd.
Fortunately, no cuts of the hilarious songs or dazzling dialogue are made (with the exception of two standard replacements where the N-word stood 125 years ago), and each singing actor climbs into his or her role with gusto. English tenor Toby Spence, in a belated Lyric debut, truly sings Nanki-Poo’s minstrelsy, and is believable both as a musician and a revealed prince and heir. Would that one could get past his ridiculous Carnaby Street costume including bright orange wig. As Yum-Yum, Canadian soprano (and Ryan Center alum) Andriana Chuchman reprises the natural feel for operetta she showed in last season’s The Merry Widow; she and Griffin get the combination of beauty and satire in her Act 2 hymn to herself, “The sun whose rays.”
As she should, American mezzo Stephanie Blythe steals the show as Katisha, the Mikado’s “daughter-in-law-elect,” who thinks the famed beauty of one of her elbows is enough for her to have the much younger Nanki-Poo as her husband. Whether playing a soothsayer in Verdi (as she does with Ulrica in the current production ofUn ballo in maschera, her first role at Lyric) or a blusterer from a London music hall as she does here, Blythe brings all her physicality and remarkable vocal range to the task.
She gets a run for her money from the comic Titipu town functionaries, Welsh-bass-baritone Neal Davies’s Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, and English baritone Andrew Shore’s Pooh-Bah, the dictionary-entering poobah of practically everything, whose expert comic turns take one back to early 20th century masters. Steadfast Chicago character baritone Philip Kraus is at his vocal best in his first outing as the nobleman Pish-Tush.
First-year Ryan Center mezzo Emily Fons and American mezzo Katharine Goeldner round out Yum-Yum’s “Three Little Maids.” And in some major luxury casting, the great American Wagnerian bass-baritone James Morris makes his role debut as the eponymous emperor of Japan with appropriate devilish hauteur.
Thompson creates some impressive individual stage pictures, especially for the contrary arias of Yum-Yum and Katisha, before beautiful wallpapered drops and beside trees tied to each character, and a moment where Donald Nally’s ever-fine chorus parades with their yellow parasols. I just wish he had recognized that Gilbert and Sullivan were more than just a writing team. They created unities.
Comments