‘Mikados’ He Wished He Had Known

If you could be present as an eyewitness at any event in history, what would it be?

I would like to have seen Cleopatra unroll herself from the rug in which she had herself presented, in the nude, to Julius Caesar in Rome.

Next to that, I would like to have seen the opening performance of Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado,” at London’s Savoy Theater, on March 14, 1885.

That, and a D’Oyly Carte production five months later in New York, set off a craze in England and America for all things Japanese. Clothing, furniture, landscaping, architecture and interior design reflected the Japanese style, or what we thought was the Japanese style.

Western excitement over Japanese design had been ignited 30 years earlier when Commodore Matthew Perry sailed an American naval squadron into Tokyo Bay and opened Japan to trade with the West. It was a ceremonial sword he had purchased at a Japanese exhibition in London that gave W. S. Gilbert his idea for “The Mikado.”

In the past century several productions have departed from the traditional Japanese costumes and sets. We have seen a “Swing Mikado,” a “Black Mikado” and a “Hot Mikado.” Richard Traubner recalls a British version set in 1996, seven years after the sale of Great Britain to Japan, when London has been changed to Mitsubishi, and a production in Zurich featuring a nude female Mikado sprayed gold and doubling as Queen Victoria. Despite those outrageous precedents, I was shocked when the curtain rose on the premiere of the Music Center Opera’s “Mikado” the other evening at the Wiltern Theater.

No kimonos. No bridges over pools. No cherry trees. No fans. No parasols atwirl. The set is the lobby of a British resort hotel in the 1920s, done entirely in white. The gentlemen of Japan who fill the stage are in formal black and gray morning wear; the bellhops wear white; the maids wear black dresses with white caps and aprons. It is reminiscent of one of those stark black-and-white Jazz Age cartoons by John Held Jr.

It seems absurd when the men begin singing the opening chorus: “If you want to know who we are/We are gentlemen of Japan . . . . “ (As Martin Bernheimer put it in his review, these gentlemen “are liars--they aren’t Japanese at all.”)

But director Jonathan Miller tells us in the program that “The Mikado” is about the English, not the Japanese. “It’s about the English class system, the Royal Family, the Cabinet. It’s as English as Buckingham Palace garden parties and the Eton-Harrow match.”

OK. I can see that. Pooh Bah(Lord High Everything Else), in his gray frock coat and top hat, is the embodiment of venal English civil authority. Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, is the ambitious public official, no less vain, petty and craven for his gray chalk stripe three-piece suit. The Mikado himself, a man of enormous girth clothed in a white linen suit and Panama hat (“a more humane Mikado never did in Japan exist”), personifies the self- indulgence of the British crown.

As Ko-Ko, Dudley Moore is not restrained by his Savile Row attire from provoking laughter with his body language and funny faces. He is no Martyn Green but his rendition of “Titwillow” is suitably touching.

Yum-Yum and her schoolmates, Pitti-Sing and Peep-Bo, seem like properly silly English schoolgirls. The hotel maids and bellhops dance with a vengeance, as if they resent their downstairs status.

Does the theater offer any more excruciating dilemma than that faced by Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo when Ko-Ko ordains that they may enjoy one month of wedded bliss, after which Nanki-Poo must be beheaded and Yum-Yum, as his widow, must by law be buried alive. A pretty mess indeed.

The words are traditional Gilbert, except for Ko-Ko’s little list of people who never would be missed. He updates the list to include TV preachers, ladies who make millions talking sex, and presidential candidates, among other contemporaries. But that’s traditional too.

Next to “The Mikado’s” premiere, I would most like to have been present at the command performance of “H.M.S. Pinafore.” That is the performance that is said to have inspired Queen Victoria to make the only remark of hers that is quoted in Bartlett’s: “We are not amused.”

“Pinafore,” of course, is a satire about the Japanese navy.