Home » Music » Opera » A Source of Innocent Merriment: The Mikado - Page 2

A Source of Innocent Merriment: The Mikado - Page 2

©

The show was an instant hit with its audience, if not the critics. At the premiere, on March 14, 1885, "Three little maids" appropriately received three encores; "The flowers that bloom in the Spring" got seven! The first Savoy run lasted nearly two years, a record 672 performances unsurpassed by any other G&S work.

Meanwhile, foreign productions blossomed, well, more like weeds than flowers. Though Die Mikado was a success in Vienna, a Brussels Le Mikado flopped because of a poor translation -- one so bad that Gilbert paid the management of a French company preparing to use it, not to open! The operetta never played Paris during his lifetime, at least as an authorized staging, because he never did approve of any French translations. Yet, because international copyright laws did not exist, there were immediate pirated productions everywhere. As early as July 1885, a purloined Mikado cropped up in Chicago. Yet another sprang up in New York literally within days of the official D'Oyly Carte premiere. And meanwhile, people were mangling what they could remember of the songs into dance numbers, or setting new words to them.

As for spinoff shows, these too grew rampantly. Consider some famous ones: Jones' 1896 The Geisha whose Madama Butterfly-like story was accompanied by some ludicrously titled numbers as "The dear little Jappy-Jap-Jappy" (as Anna Russell would say, No I am not making this up!); Jones' 1899 San Toy, containing the song "Six little wives"; Sullivan's own 1899 The Rose of Persia whose denouement is very similar to that of Mikado; Talbot's 1901 Chinese Honeymoon in which an emperor, Ylang-Ylang, wishes to marry a girl called Soo-Soo; Monckton & Talbot's 1904 The Cingalee, which includes a song called "Four little girls of Ceylon"; their The Mousmé, a fairly serious work that nonetheless manages to rival The Geisha for idiotic songs; and Norton's 1916 big hit, Chu Chin Chow.

And, if you think modern media invented hype, you should have been around in the 1880s. When Mikado mania struck, sales of genuine and imitation orientalia boomed, as did royalty-free tie-ins to the show. Statler built his famous hotel from the profits he’d made selling "Yum-Yum" ice cream; a stove was named for the Mikado; copyists flooded the market with trade cards and other advertising images based upon Mikado posters and press photos. The "three little maids" pose was a particular favorite of such artists because the position of the performers' hands enabled all manner of merchandise to be substituted for their fans: sifters, corsets, cups of beef tea...you name it.

The copyright of the article A Source of Innocent Merriment: The Mikado - Page 2 in Opera is owned by . Permission to republish A Source of Innocent Merriment: The Mikado - Page 2 in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.