Never in modern theatrical history has there been a musical phenomenon like Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic opera, “ The Mikado,” which celebrates its 125th birthday in March, 2010. There are about 20 complete CD recordings, at least three professional films, or DVDs of the (more or less) complete operas, and countless amateur sound and video recordings. At any given moment, it is a fair guess that somewhere in the world someone is singing “ Three Little Maids. ” It has been translated into probably 20 languages including Croation and Yiddish. It is a stinging satire on government corruption, snobbery, and a few other human frailties, and is as true today as it was in 1885. Change the names (as many many current productions freely do) and the satire, sadly, is a fresh as it was when Gilbert wrote it. Of course, although it takes place in Japan, and Sullivan’s music enhances the setting to perfection, the characters are all very western and the satire falls on mostly western heads on both sides of the Atlantic ocean.
Listen to the First Act for the answers to these questions:
Why did the wandering minstrel, Nanki-Poo come to the town of Titipu searching for Yum-Yum, and who is he anyway?
Actually, Nanki-Poo isn’t a wandering minstrel at all, he is the son of the Mikado, the ruler of Japan. The Mikado ordered him to marry Katisha, an elderly lady of the Mikado’s court, so he fled. On his travels, disguised as a “second trombone” in a traveling band, he met and fell in love with Yum-Yum, the ward of Ko-Ko, “a cheap tailor.”
He meets up with Pish-Tush who tells him that although Ko-Ko had been sentenced to death for flirting, under a “special interest” law of the Mikado’s designed to keep single men on the straight and narrow–and protect married men whose wives might be vulnerable to flirtatious youths, Ko-Ko had been reprieved and made Lord High Executioner instead–which had become the highest office of the city. This effectively blocked the Mikado’s flirting law because Ko-Ko was the next person scheduled to be beheaded. As Pish-Tush sang, “And so we straight let out on bail/A convict from the county jail/ Whose head was next/on some pretext/ condemn-ed to be mown off/ And made him headsman, For we said/ Who’s next to be decapi-ted/ Cannot cut off another’s head/ Until he’s cut his own off/…” At this point Pooh-Bah enters.
Many G&S specialists cite Pooh-Bah as the Mikado’s most important character. His very name has become synonymous with someone who holds many positions and with those of high ancestry. It is so defined in the dictionary.
Before you go on, look it up in an English or American dictionary.
As you watch the next scene you will discover that Pooh-Bah has an enormous pride in his background and traces his ancestry (are you ready?) to a protoplasmal primordial atomic globule. Go ahead and look them up too. It is a small jab at Charles Darwin whose theory of evolution was new and wildly popular.
But there’s one more thing about Pooh-Bah. He takes bribes and he sells state secrets. He, all by himself, with all his pre-Adamite ancestry, is the epitome of government corruption. He “earned” all his positions when Ko-Ko became the Lord High Executioner because none of the other city officers would stay in office to take orders from a former cheap tailor.
Can you think of anybody in recent history who might legitimately be called a “pooh-bah”?
Pooh-Bah tells Nanki-Poo that Yum-Yum’s whereabouts fall in the category of a state secret and, having been bribed, tells the lovesick prince/musician that Yum is about to marry Ko-Ko. That very day, in fact. At this point Ko-Ko himself enters and there follows his famous “ Little List ”song which Gilbert himself updated periodically during the huge run of the very successful Mikado and which is almost certainly the song most often revised and updated during Mikado performances worldwide. Then follows a very amusing scene as he discusses his wedding plans with Pooh-Bah who gives him conflicting advice depending on which of his many offices he is representing at that time.
Hey, where are the girls in this show, anyway? Here they are –Yum-Yum and her sisters/schoolmates Pitti-Sing and Peep-Boo and a chorus of girls, coming home from school with one of the most repeated trios in the G&S canon..
Can you guess what it is?
Right. “Three Little Maids who all unwary/ Come from a ladies’ Seminary/ Freed from its genius tutelary--/ Three Little Maids from school…” Yum reluctantly permits Ko-Ko a peck on the cheek when the girls—airheads all three, as many of Gilbert’s ingénue heroines are—catch sight of Nanki-Poo and run to him wildly excited to see him again. Finally after an uncomfortable exchange with Pooh-Bah, Yum-Yum and Nanki-Poo are finally alone together.
Note: Three Little Maids is widely repeated in concerts and spoofs of the Mikado. One recent version had male singers dressed as, um, strippers. One network TV show in the 60s had operatic soprano Joan Sutherland sing it with pop star Dinah Shore and jazz star Ella Fitzgerald. Check it out online if you can. It is occasionally broadcast on educational channels.
Nanki and Yum then engage in a romantic duet –“Were you Not to Ko-Ko plighted” which was echoed about a century later in the Rodgers and Hammerstein Broadway hit “Carousel,” –The song, “If I loved You…” Just before the song, Nanki confesses his disguise to Yum. He says, “What if it should prove that I am no musician?” “There,” she answers in her artless way, “I was certain of it, directly I heard you play.”
He then tells her he is the son of the Mikado and they sing the gentle “if only..” love duet.
But stay, as they are always saying in Gilbert & Sullivan, word comes that the Mikado, who has just noticed that there have been no executions in Titipu for a year, announces he is coming and there had better be a beheading or Titipu will be domoted to the rank of a village.
Ko-Ko admits to Pooh and Pish that he can’t kill anyone. But, by chance, he comes upon Nanki who is about to hang himself because he has lost Yum. The compromise: Ko-Ko will give Yum up for a month so Yum and Nanki can be married. When the month is up, though, Nanki will be executed. But even this solution appears to be doomed. The elderly lady from whom Nanki is hiding has come to claim her lover and in a series of choruses and solos Yum-Yum and her schoolmates manage to forestall her attempt to tell the crowd who Yum’s new fiancé really is. Yum may not be such an airhead after all. Katisha sings the mournful song, “The Hour of gladness is dead and gone” and everybody sings “For He’s Going to Marry Yum-Yum” and Act One ends with a happy chorus—but with Katisha threatening vengeance. Katisha, as Gilbert’s dowager types usually are, is depicted as mean, ugly, and generally pathetic.
Act II: It is the morning of the day Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum are to be married. Her sisters are helping her dress for the wedding but cannot help reminding her that her marriage will only last a month before her husband will be beheaded. Yum, first extolling the virtues of modesty in a bride, looks at herself in a glass and sighs: “Yes. I am indeed beautiful! Sometimes I wonder in my artless Japanese way, why it is I am so much more attractive than anyone else in the whole wide world…”
Then comes the haunting ballad, “The Sun and I.” She revels in her happiness—for a moment until her sisters remind her that there is only a month before Nanki’s scheduled execution. She weeps, but is comforted by Nanki-Poo. This leads to a happy/sad madrigal, a type of music Sullivan excelled at.
But this is only the beginning of the Act, what worse could happen?
Ko-Ko stops by and tosses in the next bombshell: he has just learned from Pooh-Bah, confirmed by all of Pooh-Bah’s offices, that when a married man is decapitated his wife is buried alive. This leads to another happy/sad little trio in which Yum-Yum warbles, “if what he says is true, ‘tis death to marry you/ Here’s a pretty howdy do.”
Nanki demands that he be executed at once, but Ko-Ko complains that he doesn’t yet know how to carry out an execution and that he is going to take lessons. Nanki insists. Finally, with the Mikado virtually on the outskirts of town they devise a plot to present the Mikado with an affidavit that Nanki has been beheaded on condition that Nanki and Yum-Yum marry and “go away and never come back,” so that Ko-Ko himself won’t be beheaded. It gets very complicated. Very topsy-turvy (in case you wondered where the name for that award winning film came from.)
Ko-Ko, Pitti-Sing and Pooh-Bah invent a touching and terrible ballad describling the false beheading for the benefit of Katisha and the Mikado who, after his “Let the Punishment Fit the Crime” song (which Gilbert almost cut on opening night) is particularly eager to hear. But here comes another calamity. Katisha is casually perusing the affidavit and finds Nanki-Poo’s name on it. The Mikado is full of sympathy―how could they have known they were executing the heir to the throne? Nevertheless, the punishment for the “executioners” should be, says the Mikado, “something lingering, with boiling oil in it, I fancy…”
Pay attention, now, it is beginning to all come together. Can you guess what happens next?
Nanki-Poo suggests to Ko-Ko that if he would convince Katisha to marry him then everything would be all right. The three sing another mega hit from the show--“The Flowers of Spring” –and even Ko-ko dolefully sees this as the only possible solution.
Ko-Ko finds Katisha and sings yet another mega hit to woo her–“Tit Willow,” the ballad of a Tom Tit who threw himself into the billowy wave all from a broken heart. Katisha’s heart melts and the (more or less) happy pair sing “Beauty in the bellow of the blast…” and they go off to find the Mikado and beg for “mercy for Ko-Ko, mercy for Pitti-Sing and even mercy for Pooh-Bah.” Nanki and Yum enter and although Katisha’s first instinct is to slaughter her new husband, the Mikado counsels “Yes, you are entitled to a little explanation, but I think he will give it better whole than in pieces.” All sing, “For He’s gone and married Yum-Yum,” reprise the madrigal, and, as the Mikado says, “Nothing could be more satisfactory.”
Sources: The Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan, by Ian Bradley; The Gilbert and Sullivan Book, by Leslie Baily; The Gilbert and Sullivan Lexicon, by Harry Benford; Topsy-Turvy, the Mike Leigh film; Gilbert and Sullivan, A Dual Biography, by Michael Ainger.
