Gilbert & Sullivan

G&S101
G&S Story: Part III
by John Kenrick

The Mikado

Living Up To The Mikado

Curtain Calls

Legacy in Britain

(All the photos on this page are thumbnails – click on them to see larger versions.)

The Mikado: "Object All Sublime"
The D'Oyly Carte Company's 1936 film version of The Mikado, with Martyn Green (center, in black robe) as KoKo.

Gilbert offered yet another plot involving a love potion, and when Sullivan balked, the disagreement turned ugly. Sullivan declared that it was time for him to concentrate on more serious compositions, and Gilbert resented the suggestion that their collaboration was holding Sullivan back. D'Oyly Carte staged a revival of The Sorcerer to keep the company going. The partnership was on the brink of collapse when a decorative Japanese sword fell from the wall of Gilbert's study, nearly beaning the librettist – and inspiring the plot for the most popular show in the G&S canon.

The Mikado (1885 - 672) reflected an 1880s craze for “all things Japanese.” The complicated plot centers on what happens when a fictional Emperor of Japan decrees that flirting is punishable by death. Because no one in the town of Titipu is willing to enforce this horrible law, a condemned tailor (Koko) is appointed Lord High Executioner – the reasoning being that he cannot behead anyone until he beheads himself. When it turns out he has to execute someone after all, he selects Nanki-Poo, a traveling minstrel. Nanki-Poo will only agree to the scheme if he can first marry the executioner's ward and finance, the lovely Yum-Yum. This would allow the minstrel a month of happiness, after which the Executioner can behead the man and marry his ward as originally planned. However, an aged woman (Katisha) from the royal court appears, announcing that Nanki-poo is actually the crown prince who has been in hiding since he toyed with her affections! The Mikado himself soon arrives to proclaim that his "object all sublime" is "to let the punishment fit the crime." After a series of deceptions and misunderstandings no one dies and everything is resolved.

The Mikado's Japanese setting and costumes masked the fact that it was a send-up of British customs and pretensions. “Three Little Maids From School,” “A Wand'ring Minstrel I” and “Titwillow” were sung everywhere. In the United States, The Mikado was the only G&S operetta to repeat the impact of H.M.S. Pinafore, as "Mikado-mania" fed a new American passion for all things Japanese.

The Mikado is the only G&S musical that has been widely performed in languages other than English. It is also one of the few musicals that ever led to a diplomatic fracas. When the Crown Prince of Japan made a state visit to Britain in 1907, the work was temporarily banned by the government -- a maneuver that backfired when the prince complained that he had hoped to see The Mikado during his stay. It remains one of the most frequently produced musicals of all time, and still receives amateur and professional stagings worldwide.

Living up to The Mikado
Few things are harder than trying to follow a smashing success, especially if it's your own. Gilbert and Sullivan's melodramatic spoof Ruddigore (1887 - 288) had its charms. Although rarely staged today, it has a fine score and a well crafted story – but many complained that it was not another Mikado. (As if anything could be?) Sullivan once again grumbled that he should be working on more serious compositions, and made it clear that he was ready to abandon operetta altogether. Gilbert enticed him with a libretto unlike any other in the series. Set in the Tower of London during the reign of Henry VIII, The Yeomen of the Guard (1888 - 423) had political intrigue and the threat of execution overshadowing a romance. Yeoman gave Sullivan the opportunity for his most melodically ambitious Savoy score, and Gilbert's script had little trace of his "topsy-turvy" sense of humor. The most serious of Gilbert and Sullivan's works, it was Sullivan's personal favorite.

The team resumed their comic ways with The Gondoliers (1889 - 554), the story of two anti-royalist Venetian gondoliers who find themselves kings of a revolution-torn country. G&S had tremendous fun with the foibles of monarchy and democracy, and the show became a massive hit on both sides of the Atlantic. The reclusive Queen Victoria invited the D'Oyly Carte company to give several private performances in her various homes, including a memorable Gondoliers at Windsor Castle (pictured in the thumbnail at left). These performances confirmed the new respectability Gilbert and Sullivan had brought to the musical theatre. No doubt Her Majesty enjoyed a quartet in which the gondoliers and their fiancées sing of what a glorious thing it is "to be a regular royal queen."

When it seemed Gilbert and Sullivan's collaboration was at its peak, it fell apart over several trivial disputes – including an infamous quarrel over the price of some new carpeting in the Savoy Theatre. D'Oyly Carte and his wife Helen sided with Sullivan, and produced his long awaited grand opera Ivanhoe -- which proved a financial failure. Gilbert, who had made a huge fuss over nothing, resumed writing plays -- which didn't fare any better.

After several years, the Savoy trio effected a reconciliation, but things were never quite the same. Utopia Limited (1893 - 245) made fun of Britain's attempts to remake other nations in its own image, and The Grand Duke (1896 -123) had a theatrical troupe trying to seize power in a tottering German principality. While both works were melodic and entertaining, neither ran long enough to cover their high production costs. Both Gilbert and Sullivan were losing the fresh creative edge that had enlivened their most popular works.

Curtain Calls
Gilbert reading the libretto of Utopia Limited to the cast on the first day of rehearsal at The Savoy Theatre in London.

Gilbert and Sullivan remained on cordial terms in their final years, and were hailed by the public. Sullivan received a knighthood in 1888, and the old collaborators shared curtain calls when revivals of their hits opened. Sullivan wrote comic operas with new librettists, including the well-received The Emerald Isle (1900). Weakened by years of kidney trouble, he succumbed to a severe case of bronchitis in 1900, dying at age 58.

Gilbert enjoyed renewed health and popularity in the new century, writing plays and musical librettos, and finally receiving his overdue knighthood in 1907. He even had the satisfaction of living long enough to be acclaimed as what he was – a British national treasure. In late May 1911, Gilbert (at age 74) suffered a fatal heart attack while saving a young woman from drowning on his country estate.

After many years of illness, Richard D'Oyly Carte died in 1901. The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company continued under the management of his wife Helen, son Rupert and granddaughter Bridget, reviving the best of G&S through most of the 20th century. Financial woes forced the company to shut down in 1983, but thanks to seed money left by Bridget, a "new" D'Oyly Carte organization was soon formed. Although the founding family is no longer in charge, the company continues to stage popular revivals of the G&S cannon in Britain.

The G&S Legacy in Britain
Robert Morley as Gilbert and Maurice Evans as Sullivan in the British screen bio The Gilbert & Sullivan Story.

The works of G&S have been popular with all levels of British society for more than a hundred years – an extraordinary achievement in one of the world's most class-conscious cultures. Professional and amateur groups performed the canon throughout the British Empire and the United States. Thanks to Gilbert and Sullivan, the British public's affection for popular music became stronger than ever. Noel Coward gives us a sense of what it was like to grow up in Britain at the turn of the 20th century –

"I was born into a generation that still took light music seriously. The lyrics and melodies of Gilbert and Sullivan were hummed and strummed into my consciousness at an early age. My father sang them, my mother played them, my nurse, Emma, breathed them through her teeth while she was washing me, dressing me and undressing me and putting me to bed. My aunts and uncles, who were legion, sang them singly and in unison at the slightest provocation."
- The introduction to The Noel Coward Song Book (London: Methuen, 1953), p. 9.

The D'Oyly Carte family retained exclusive British production rights to all the Gilbert & Sullivan operettas. While this arrangement encouraged ongoing interest in the works and helped to develop a solid G&S "tradition," it also limited the ways in which these musical could be produced and performed.

What can be confidently said is that the combination of the "tradition" and D'Oyly Carte exclusivity kept several generations of performers, conductors and directors from bringing their gifts to Gilbert and Sullivan. We will never know what Noel Coward might have brought to the role of Sir Joseph Porter, for example, or how Charles Laughton might have played Wilfred Shadbolt. Julie Andrews never sang Josephine or Mabel. Sir Thomas Beecham never conducted Yeomen of the Guard . . . we can only speculate on what was lost.
- Gayden Wren, A Most Ingenious Paradox: The Art of Gilbert and Sullivan (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), pp. 292-293.

It is almost impossible to estimate the influence G&S had on the development of musical theatre, both as a business and as an art form, in Britain and the United States. Thanks to them, the musical theatre was redefined forever. The changes were many . . .

Next: After Gilbert and Sullivan