The Panjandrum of Toboku: The Mikado Redone for Modern Sensitivies

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During my lifetime, I have seen well-to-do people of color gleefully collecting vintage bric-a-brac that in the days of their parents and grandparents would have fueled race riots. I can bravely predict that in another generation or two, when I am no longer around to see it, The Mikado will be rediscovered and gleefully performed as its authors envisioned it, with everyone-including Japanese-wondering what all the fuss was about. Meanwhile, those of us who love G&S scrabble for ways to save perhaps the biggest box-office draw in our repertory (rivaled only by Pinafore).

We recognize that it might be futile. Likely the Japanese tie-in was among the elements that made The Mikado such a blockbuster in its own day. And perhaps awareness of what the show traditionally was remains too raw a wound for any bandage whatever to suffice for a generation or two. Yet we scrabble on.

This, then, is one more effort to render Gilbert & Sullivan’s masterpiece racially and ethnically inoffensive. Unable to see how simply changing the national or ethnic group can solve the problem, I have tried turning the story openly into the province of Gilbert’s fantasy Topsyturvydom that it always was beneath its pseudo-Japanese mask, as were Pinafore and the others beneath their British (or, exceptionally, Venetian, Utopian, and Pfenig Halbpfennigan) veneers.