Staging Turns ‘The Mikado’ on Its Ear

William Schwenck Gilbert was diligent in dictating the way he and composer Arthur Sullivan wanted their famous 19th century Savoy operas to go. But by the middle of this century, the famous G&S; style had ossified into numbing routine.

“We have a wonderful word in England called ‘twee,’ which is untranslatable,” said stage director Christopher Renshaw, whose staging of “The Mikado” opens a four-engagement run Tuesday at the Orange County Performing Arts Center in Costa Mesa.

“The style was very twee--very unsexual, unforward, very nice, like taking tea. [My staging] is raucous and sexy and very populistic in its approach. I wanted to kick [theirs] in the nether regions and bring out my own commercial upfront yearnings, which now have been fulfilled in many other ways.”

The many other ways include last year’s Tony-Award-winning Broadway revival of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s “The King and I,” which Renshaw directed and which is still running, and the new Cole Porter-Philip Barry musical, “High Society,” created at ACT (American Conservatory Theater) in San Francisco, which he is preparing for its Broadway premiere next spring.

In fact, Broadway has kept him so busy that Stuart Maunder, an assistant from Australia, presided over the staging of “The Mikado” for Opera Pacific in Costa Mesa. Renshaw arrived over the weekend for final touches.

Born outside London, Renshaw, 44, planned to be a musician. He studied as a pianist and organist at Oxford and sang countertenor in the Magdalen College Choir on its first-ever visit to America. “Then I completely ditched the musical side. I have not kept up my singing. If I tried to sing, I would have to be stopped.

“In actual terms, I was looking for something that I could succeed in,” he continued. “I tried to be a singer, a pianist, an actor, but felt I didn’t have the talent.”

He tried directing and conducting a production of Britten’s “Curlew River,” which drew national press--”for my directing, which made me give up conducting,” he said. That was in 1970. “Literally, that’s how arbitrary [my career choice] was.”

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From there he “just fell” from Oxford to Glyndebourne, then to the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, where he met soprano Joan Sutherland. When she returned to her native Australia, Renshaw followed and directed about nine productions there.

But he didn’t find directing opera rewarding. “To come up with a [directing] concept meant to shock or startle the audience, that can get tedious. The best direction, in real terms, is something you don’t even notice. You just watch a piece and have a wonderful time.”

His production of “Mikado” goes back to 1986 at Sadler’s Wells. He took the idea of the Japan exhibition in 1890 in Knightsbridge, which had inspired Gilbert, and turned it into a spoof of the British interest in the Far East, which amounted, he said, to “just a fashion statement of that age, which was restlessly looking for things that were new.”

He told his scenic designer, Tim Goodchild, to create a set that looked like a china cabinet in which knickknacks are kept. The characters “live in Tiffany cups. Pooh-Bah lives in a drawer. The Mikado and Katisha are two Japanese dolls on top of the cabinet. It’s sort of an Expressionist, surreal attempt to mix the two cultures, with a singular lack of respect for the English.”

The original cast had problems with all the dance movement he required. “English opera choruses were not used to having to do any kind of simple Broadway steps. They can’t think and act like they can in America. That’s kind of why I moved here.”

(Renshaw remains a British citizen but rarely returns. “I’m fully committed now to living here,” he said.)

The chief singers, too, resisted his dramatic demands. “I found it terribly depressing,” he said. “Some singers take their acting life very seriously. Others only want to produce great sounds and have very little interest in the piece.

“But opera has changed in the years I haven’t been directing opera. I would love to come back and apply what I’ve learned in the last 10 years and see what the differences are in the singers. I hope one day to put my toe in the water again.”

* Opera Pacific will present Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Mikado” on Tuesday, Thursday and Saturday at 7:30 p.m. and Sunday at 2 p.m. at the Orange County Performing Arts Center, 600 Town Center Drive, Costa Mesa. $28 to $93. (714) 556-2787.