Utopia Opera will present Forbear! Theatre's fantasy-set production of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado this fall in New York City. The London-based Forbear! Theatre is currently touring with the production in England.
The production, directed and choreographed by Forbear! Theatre founder and artistic director Rachel Gianesse Middle, is reimagined through the lens of high fantasy. Said Middle: “If there’s one thing I’m more obsessed with than G&S, it is the fantasy genre. In the worlds of stories such as The Lord of the Rings, Game of Thrones, etc., anyone would fully believe that these characters could be arrested and executed at the drop of a hat.” The Mikado will be performed with a 24-piece orchestra with musical direction by Forbear! musical director and Utopia Opera founder William Remmers.
The 1885 opera by W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan has come under heavy scrutiny in the 21st century for the English writers’ use of a faux-Japanese setting. Productions in recent years have attempted to deal with the work in a variety of ways, often by revising the libretto to re-set it in a different location entirely. Middle’s fantasy setting has retained most of Gilbert’s text, but changed the names of the characters "using the languages of ancient cultures that are part of [Middle’s] own English, Scottish, and Irish heritage: Old Norse, Old English, and Gaelic. Each name uses a combination of words or parts of words from these languages to create names as close as possible to the original names, retaining the poetry and the rhyming/rhythmic structure, and each of the names contains clues about their character." Along with the names, the characters are reimagined as an assortment of “elves, satyrs, and anthropomorphic beasts.”
In the plot of the opera, Æthel-Rún, secretly the son of the Emperor, is in love with M'na Yum, who is in turn engaged to Klók-Cow, a lowly tailor. Klók-Cow is under sentence of death, but through a remarkable circumstance has also attained the rank of Lord High Executioner. When word comes down from the Emperor that an execution must take place within a month, the characters scramble to find a willing victim.
Gilbert and Sullivan's operas have been rethought and reinvented for almost as long as the operas themselves have been around, from George S. Kaufman's Hollywood Pinafore in 1945, to Roundabout Theatre Company's Pirates! A Penzance Musical, currently on Broadway, and which incorporates songs from other Gilbert and Sullivan works, including The Mikado.
Founded in 2015, Forbear! Theatre has established itself as one of the present day's foremost Gilbert and Sullivan companies, performing the series of comic operas around England and at the International Gilbert and Sullivan Festival. The production’s New York engagement will be presented by Utopia Opera, which previously partnered with Forbear! on a production of H.M.S. Pinafore in 2023. The Mikado will be performed at Hunter College's Lang Recital Hall October 3-5. For tickets, visit UtopiaOpera.org, and visit ForbearTheatre.com for more information about the production.
