Building a Better Mikado

For a while I’ve been grappling with how I’d deal with The Mikado the next time I had to review it.

As much as I love the music and the comedy of one of Gilbert & Sullivan’s greatest works, it’s become harder and harder to overlook the traditional spectacle of a cast of almost always white actors in yellowface putting on a kind of minstrel-show mockery of Japanese culture as a roundabout way of satirizing Victorian Britain. The fact that that’s still the standard way to present the material in the 21st century is baffling. Fortunately, Lamplighters Music Theater, which puts on the show every four years, has caught up with the times and has just introduced a new version of The Mikado transplanted into Renaissance Italy. And you know what? Absolutely nothing that’s great about The Mikado has been sacrificed, only the kinda racist stuff. You can read my review in the East Bay Times and Mercury News.

F. Lawrence Ewing as Coco, Michele Schroeder as Pizzi, and Wm. H. Neil as Poobà in Lamplighters’ The New Mikado. Photo by Lucas Buxman.

Review: Guilt-free ‘Mikado’ unveiled by Lamplighters

The New Mikado — Una Commedia Musicale
Through August 28
Lamplighters Music Theatre
Mountain View Center for the Performing Arts, August 13-14
Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, August 19-21
Bankhead Theater, Livermore, August 27-28
www.lamplighters.org

Show #87 of 2016, attended August 6.