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Sarah Tynan in the Coliseum's version of The Mikado |
The Mikado - part 2
THE MIKADO
Coliseum
JONATHAN Miller may still be one of our best opera directors, but the pop-pickers running the Coliseum seem to think he’s too old for the job – they haven’t asked him back to do a show for years.
Yet year after year his Mikado packs out their theatre, and helps keep it financially afloat. And as it gets its umpteenth revival in 22 years, it is now more topical than ever.
Consider “Lord High Everything Else” Pooh-Bah in the fictional city of Titipu, who combines the offices, among other things, of Archbishop, Lord Mayor, Paymaster General, and Lord Chief Justice, and who will sell state secrets to anybody for “a small consideration”: that acerbic librettist WS Gilbert might have been inspired by the news pages today, so accurately does he portray the gentle art of political sleaze.
But he was a sublime fantasist, as well as a satirist: this plot is both crazily over-the-top and perfectly logical.
Since wandering minstrel Nanki-Poo, who is really the son of the emperor, wants to commit suicide, he makes the ideal candidate for an execution which must be carried out to meet the annual “target”; since executioner Ko-Ko has thus killed the heir to the throne, he must in turn be executed… except that he can’t execute himself, and in any case he was too squeamish to kill the prince, so merely pretended to…
And that’s just the beginning of the story which unfolds in Miller’s production with scintillating panache.
You can see how much the English National Opera singers relish doing this show, with its brilliant music, saucy choreography, wicked double entendres, and black-and-white Art Deco designs.
And we get a dream cast led by the awesome Richard Angas as the Mikado, Frances McCafferty as the equally awesome spinster Katisha pursuing Nanki-Poo (played by the mellifluous Robert Murray), the lovely Sarah Tynan as Yum-Yum, Nanki-Poo’s real love-interest, and the peerless Richard Suart as the Lord High Executioner. And on his ever-updated “little list” (of “people who won’t be missed”) we find Nigella Lawson, David Conway, plus a few possibly less-deserving targets, like free papers...
Ten performances only Until March 4
0871 911 0200
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