HOT MIKADO
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Perhaps because its pseudo-oriental setting raised it to a new height of comedic improbability, The Mikado quickly proved susceptible to spoofing and tinkering; the Thatcher, Primrose, and West Minstrels’ The Mick-a-doh, for instance, played in New York within a few months of the original’s London opening. Probably the most famous takeoffs appeared in 1939, the year that two African American adaptations vied for New York audiences. Swing Mikado actually opened in Chicago in 1938 as an effort of the government-sponsored Federal Theatre Project. When impresario Michael Todd tried and failed to purchase commercial rights to the show, he opened his own Hot Mikado, starring the great tap dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson, which ran on Broadway and then at the New York World’s Fair. Swing Mikado, meanwhile, ended up in the hands of Chicago producers Bernard Ulrich and Melvin Ericson after its funding was cut by congressional conservatives (sound familiar?).
The idea of a black Mikado is a little ironic, considering that Gilbert’s original lyrics employ the word “nigger” at least twice. The first time is in “I’ve Got a Little List,” the Lord High Executioner Ko-Ko’s patter song about all the people without whom society would get along just fine: “There’s the nigger serenader, and the others of his race. . . . They never would be missed,” sings the snickersnee-wielding headsman. It’s been argued that Gilbert meant not black people but white entertainers in blackface; the line was changed in the 1940s to “banjo serenader.” In any case, it’s hard to imagine what Gilbert would have thought of an integrated Mikado with whites and blacks singing in a black-born musical idiom.
Katisha is one of those contralto battle-axes who are staples of the G & S canon–the targets of cruel jokes about female attractiveness yet also the characters with the most soul. In Fields’s performance, Katisha’s a blues belter whose outrageous interaction with Lehman’s Ko-Ko makes for the most hilarious Mikado ever. Their climactic courtship scene, with Ko-Ko singing the mock-pathetic “Tit-Willow” to soften the formidable Katisha’s bloodthirsty heart, is as richly funny as 19th-century operetta or 20th-century musical comedy could ever hope to be, because the performers let their contemporary personalities infuse but not warp the material. And Katisha’s aria “Alone and Yet Alive” is actually improved by Fields’s lush gospel-style reading; the churchy beat even bolsters the old-fashioned lyrics (“Hearts do not break / They sting and ache / For old love’s sake / But do not die / Though with each breath / They long for death / As witnesseth the living I”).
