MUSIC : Gilbert and Sullivan Meet the Marx Brothers

Jonathan Miller strides down the aisle of the Embassy Theatre, rehearsal site for his much-talked-about production of “The Mikado.” He places a bottle each of orange juice and mineral water on the stage edge and pulls a package of trail mix from his pocket--all the while eyeing a background prop and removing his tweed jacket.

There is work to be done. But from all appearances, the work--transplanted from the English National Opera, where his 1986 staging had its premiere--is more like exhilarating play. Within moments Miller gets the rehearsal going and, from his front-row seat, radiates pleasure.

“I’m amazed at how much faster these girls are than ours in London,” he says. “They tap-dance, you know.”

What? Tap dancing? In “The Mikado”? Well, judging from the way Miller has worked in the past, the idea of Gilbert and Sullivan meeting the Marx Brothers may not be as entirely outrageous as it might seem. (The co-production of the ENO, Music Center Opera and Houston Grand Opera opens at the Wiltern Theatre Thursday night, during the UK/LA ’88 Festival.)

“Cooking ‘The Mikado’ in ‘Duck Soup,’ ” says Miller, “can’t be altogether bad for Anglo-American relations.”

Especially when one of the chefs is Dudley Moore, enlisted to make his operetta debut as Ko-Ko, a man of many words--words the comic actor has yet to learn.

At the moment, Miller’s cohort from their “Beyond the Fringe” days huddles in a row by himself, nose buried in his libretto, lips moving silently. Funnyman Moore, whose entrance comes later, is not laughing. Yet.

One reason, of course, has to do with the unfamiliar terrain. This, after all, is neither the movie set nor London/Broadway stage that he typically habituates. It is the preserve of the Music Center Opera. And although Moore knows a thing or two about music--having earned degrees in piano and composition from Oxford--he’s been satisfied, apparently, to leave Gilbert and Sullivan to the patter-song lovers.

Until now.

It’s almost time for his entrance, and Moore climbs onstage, muttering “enough of this studying stuff.” While some reassembling temporarily stops the action, he casts a frustrated, beseeching look over at Miller, who is crouched on the edge of a front-row seat, and yells a personal aside: “If only I could learn the . . . words.” Laughter reverberates.

He listens next to an intro played by the rehearsal pianist and quips, “This is ‘Mathis der Maler,’ isn’t it?”

During a break, Moore admits that he’s never done Gilbert and Sullivan, nor even seen a staging of this most beloved among their works--unless one wants to count the opening scene of “Foul Play,” the film in which he plays a polymorphous pervert who keeps luring women to his pornographic cartoon of an apartment.

So how does he explain his presence here?

“I love Jonathan,” he says of Miller. “All I wanted was to have lunch with him, and now I’m doing Ko-Ko.”

But it’s not for lack of discipline or because of star-status indulgence that he lags somewhat behind the other cast members. The fact is, Moore has just wrapped up “Arthur on the Rocks,” the sequel to his big Hollywood success, “Arthur,” scheduled for a June release. What’s more, he is a brand-new bridegroom--having dashed down the aisle with Brogan Lane in Las Vegas just before rehearsals began.

The break ends and Moore takes his place center stage. Looking lovably frumpy, the pixie-ish wag soon has the cast and other spectators howling--Miller included.

When Ko-Ko suddenly changes voice and accent--asking Nanki-Poo (Michael Smith), “What are you doing with them pills?”--Miller, who interpolated the ungrammatical usage, explains that Ko-Ko “is really a Cockney barrow-boy who sells food from his cart.” This, then, is the speech natural to him, not his earlier pretense of how he thinks a gentleman talks.

Now the revisionist director sits back and just enjoys the scene for a moment. “Dudley is a real actor, besides being a marvelously accomplished clown,” he says. “I’m not worried.”

And as things turn out, Moore has memorized far more text than he has led anyone to expect. In fact, the dialogue takes on a sudden naturalness with Ko-Ko’s presence. He interacts. He doesn’t deliver his lines according to the spat-out, starched, high-projection rules of a Savoyard purist. But he brings a spontaneous humor to them.

Just as he’s leaving the stage, Miller scrambles from seat to stage. “Try this,” he says to Moore, furiously angling his long, lean body in a demented, sideways stride, arms swinging. The cast convulses.

The only thing better than one funny man is two funny men.

During lunch at a restaurant adjoining the theater, the two British satirists confess to never having seen a single D’Oyly Carte production. Ironically, in the midst of the UK/LA ’88 Festival, they are championing the very model of a G&S; export without so much as a nod to tradition.

But if they are not faithful servants to that Savoyard tradition, they do promise to add a provocatively entertaining element to the project.

“It’s Jonathan’s fresh and breezy approach that I counted on,” says Moore, digging into sweet-and-sour fish before him. “As you can guess, I’ve never been a great fan of Gilbert and Sullivan. But I played violin once in ‘HMS Pinafore.’ That was when I still wanted to play the instrument so badly that I played it badly,” he chuckles.

Since talking over the production with Miller, though, Moore says he realizes “there is a fruitful way” to do it. “But the possibility of going absolutely nuts onstage is still a surprise to me. I just never knew the script could be played with such lunacy.” (Miller interjects: “Inspired lunacy always has a stable scaffold.”)

“In fact,” Moore continues, “I was worried until now about finding the character’s voice. Just like in the song (the first-act patter trio), my Ko-Ko head was teeming with ideas. What a relief to find out my normal lunatic way works. And how strangely seductive the stage is, now that I’m back.”

As for discrepancies between himself and the other cast members, most of whom are opera singers accustomed to a conventional style of G&S;, Moore hopes that “they will all get sillier and drop the self-conscious delivery.” Furthermore, he’s convinced that “The Mikado” “doesn’t have to be a piece of porcelain. . . . The dialogue’s politeness has dictated the primly restrained style.”

Miller nods approvingly. But isn’t he worried that his “Fringe” friend might take too many liberties?

“Not at all,” says the hands-on director. “This staging is so dense and detailed and produced and determined that he’ll find it hard not to participate. It isn’t a star vehicle. I am committed to the notion of Gesamtkunstwerk (total art work).

“My aesthetic credo is to conjure tricks by changing just one crucial element. Given this, a single actor cannot disturb the vision. More important is the conceptual integrity. There’s no sabotage here of Gilbert and Sullivan,” he explains, contrasting his “Mikado” to Joseph Papp’s musically altered “Pirates of Penzance.”

“Except for the ‘little list’ (which most productions tailor to the audience’s culture), I haven’t tampered with the libretto,” he says, “just updated it. On the other hand, don’t look for literalism.”

He’s referring to the absence of japonaiserie , the very fad that inspired Gilbert’s libretto, the fad that had lacquer boxes and bonsai trees in every English household circa 1885. There’s not a kimono or fan to be found among Stefanos Lazaridis’ set, which, Miller says, is a white plaster cast of the 1920s-style lobby of the Anglo-American Hotel in Florence, complete with potted palms.

“But if you search for it,” he says, “you’ll see a postage-stamp size Mt. Fuji from a rear window.” And he promises that, at first sight, the production will look like an outtake from an old American musical, something in stylish black and white, “as sumptuous as a plate of expensive meringues.”

From Miller’s point of view, replacing the kingdom of Titipu with the Fredonia of “Duck Soup” is just one way of excising the Conservative Party from “The Mikado.” His sociology lesson goes something like this:

“The world of the ‘30s musical is filled with class-struggle images. They invariably materialize amid the wealth and glamour seen on great luxury liners or in splendid spa hotels. We are looking at it all through the eyes of the little Jewish florists or Irish bellhops, who service the Margaret Dumont-type matriarchs, those terminally gracious, uninsultable, joke-proof characters with the huge uncleaved bosoms.

“It’s a view of elegance held by Lower East Side immigrants--the same people who found their way to Hollywood and put all these impressions on the screen. It’s a whiter-than-white WASP world as seen by the Marx Brothers: Groucho, whose crouching Jewish-tailor-walk probably derived from getting down on his knees to pin hemlines; Chico, who represented the Italian, and Harpo, the dumb Irishman. All these little people fantasizing a ‘Philadelphia Story’ kind of elegance.”

With that, Miller launches into his hilarious Marx Brothers dialogue, reciting Groucho’s gruff, cigar-stained lines verbatim and, without dropping a beat or an accent, those of a hooty, soprano-ish “someone-someone the Third” who constantly sighs, “Ooooh, Rufus.”

He likens Groucho to Ko-Ko, “who is really a shyster, a con man. Dudley must discover that quality.”

Back at the rehearsal, Miller bounds onstage and shows Marvellee Cariaga how to transform Katisha into a Margaret Dumont or a Mrs. Rittenhouse III. And when the three little maids lick their lollipops between stanzas, he hollers out: “This has got to be a businessman’s fantasy.”

The cast members seem to be as entertained by Miller as they are enlightened. When he explains to Nanki-Poo the proper superciliousness with which to approach Yum-Yum (Dale Wendel), he says: “It must have that Noel Coward brittleness, that daahling-daahling quality, with coruscations of cut glass.’

Next he excitedly talks about the tap-dancing segment: “This is right out of ‘42nd Street.’ ” To Smith and Wendel he says: “Yes, that’s right. Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler,” while passing around production shots of a tuxedoed male chorus, sans heads, top hats in hand. When he beholds Donald Adams, the 30-year veteran of D’Oyly Carte wars--playing Pooh-Bah for the first time--he encourages him to try for “an embalmed, monocular stare.”

It’s a far cry, he says, from his last visit here--directing a “Tristan und Isolde” that was advertised nationally as “Tristan und Isolde und David (Hockney).”

“Then,” says Miller, “I was just a real estate agent showing people around the premises.” Now he seems to have his own piece of property.