The Mikado

ABOUT

Cape Town G&S is excited to announce their next online streamed event, The Mikado, which will stream online via Quicket from Friday 9 October to Saturday 18 October 2020. 

This is one of Gilbert and Sullivan’s most popular and finest comic operas and has a humorous Japanese flavour. This production was directed by Roché Haupt Buckle with Musical Direction by Alastair Cockburn, accompanied by the Cape Town Philharmonic Orchestra.

This production toured to The International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival in England and won the most prestigious award of Best Traditional Opera.

The Mikado was the most successful of the collaborations between WS Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan, and remains the most popular. Although set in Japan, giving a wonderful opportunity for spectacular sets and costumes, the follies and inconsistencies which Gilbert satirises are all universal, and the same can be said for Sullivan’s always glorious music.

It includes such well-known show-stoppers as A Wand’ring Minstril, I, I’ve got a Little List, Three Little Maids from School, Brightly dawns our Wedding Day, The Flowers that Bloom in Spring, and Tit-Willow.

The story-line is quirky, very funny, and highly entertaining: Nanki-Poo (Marco Titus), son of the Emperor of Japan (Peter Kramer), has fled the royal palace in disguise to escape a forced marriage to the haughty, unpleasant and elderly Katisha (Monika Voysey). In Titipu, he falls in love with a beautiful young commoner, Yum-Yum (Karen Wilson-Harris), always accompanied by her best friends Pitti-Sing (Karlé Briedenhann) and Peep-Bo (Carmen Enslin). However, Yum-Yum is engaged to her guardian, Ko-Ko (Simon Speck), originally a cheap tailor, who has been elevated to the rank of Lord High Executioner by the town elders, the Lord High Everything Else, Pooh-Bah (Stephan le Roux) and his side-kick Pish-Tush (Waldo Buckle), by a piece of crooked manipulation. To complicate matters Katisha arrives to claim her missing fiancé. All is eventually settled satisfactorily, but only after much intrigue, many comic antics, and lots of beautiful music.