Customer Reviews

Gilbert & Sullivan - The Mikado / Greene, Australian Opera

5 star:		(0)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(8)

 

 

I am an opera and Gilbert and Sullivan buff. I also am willing to try new versions and am willing to accept unusual variants of an opera.

Technically, this opera suffers from the same problems that the Gondoliers from Australia Opera suffers from. In particular, the audio is poor. As the singers move about the stage, the sound level varies. This is very distracting. The enunciation of the singers was execellent, however, and remains the sole bright spot of this performance.

Artistically, this opera suffers from a near disdain upon the stage director's attitude towards the opera. He has mixed Victorian and Chinese clothes together on the same people. I can accept this. However, he also has the characters popping out of jugs, cabinets, etc. and riding on jugs. The school girls come in on a train, The three sisters fight and squabble, etc. This becomes distracting quickly and then becomes annoying. They throw the good lines from Gilbert away and attempt to make other lines funny. It got so bad that my wife and I stopped watching this DVD. We have never made up our minds before without seeing the complete opera, but this was so bad and seemed to be more interested in spoofing the Mikado than playing the Mikado.

There is the usual alterations to Koko's list to make it relevant to the time and place of the opera and I can accept this with no real problems. When Nanki-Poo blows a note in "A wandering minstrel I", we were willing to accept this as a price of an actual performance. But the audio problems that were fairly consistent, the apparent disdain on the part of the stage director, and the mugging of the singers became too overwhelming to enjoy the performance at all.

A far better DVD of this light opera is the Stratford Festival perfromance [...]. The singing isn't quite as good but the staging is imaginative, sprightly, and very enjoyable.

If you've just seen Topsy Turvy and would like to get the full performance of The Mikado, look elsewhere other than this cheesy Australian production that is more mean-spirited in it's sendup of this classic comic opera than entertaining. I half-expected to hear boos coming from the live audience yet they obediently clapped after every number.

Still, this might be an interesting rendition to compare to others if the production quality was anywhere close to that of, say, any Sondheim show on video/DVD. Imagine, if you will, those dust-covered VHS tapes of your old high school operetta and you'll come close to what this "DVD" offers.

The sound is deplorable and most dialogue is unintelligible. The fact that there is a 5.1 choice for the sound is a joke. It is a purely mono soundtrack with no resonance at all. If the singers had only been mic'd you might be able to hear but it sounds like they were using off stage microphones. I'm not sure.

The cast is heavy on silliness and low on singing talent. The costumes and set is a mish-mash of styles and periods that they probably thought was brilliant and revolutionary. Imagine in 100 years when someone decides to do Les Miserables in glo-in-the-dark spandex tights in the name of originality. Know what I mean? Leave it alone!

One can only wonder why they wanted to commit this tripe to a recording. Don't waste your money.

As much as I wanted to like this production of Gilbert & Sullivan's classic opera of Japanese hijinks, this Opera Australia production was marred by both uneven performances and a DVD soundtrack that borders on the poor side.
It's truly a shame as there is much to like in this production. The costumes, a curious mix of British and Japanese styles, are very colorful and fun. The set, with it's almost "Alice in Wonderland" feel, is both majestic and involving. It also boasts some very solid performances in Heather Begg's touching, if nasty, Katisha and the sly rendition of Pooh-Bah by Gregory Yurisich. Anne-Maree McDonald is a delicious Yum-Yum, while Robert Eddie makes for an imposing, if a tad bland, Mikado. Unfortunately, Graeme Ewer's Ko-Ko is all mock posture and no heart. Indeed, it is one of the flattest performances of the role that I have ever seen. His only triumph is his plaintive and touching performance of the "Titwillow" song. Jennifer Bermingham's Pitti-Sing is much too harsh to be likable, while Peter Cousen's Nanki-Poo comes across like a smarmy brat. Add to that a soundtrack that is very soft in volume and flat, and you have a MIKADO that is pure frustration to watch. This might be worth your time to at least catch the high points mentioned, but there are other and better versions of this classic available for you to own and enjoy. Recommended for MIKADO completists only....otherwise avoid this one.

Having just recently purchasd the Patience DVD by the same Opera Company. I thought l was going to be again pleasantly surprised by the production. How wrong l was. The sound is appalling. Image Entertainment should be ashamed of themselves for distributing such rubbish. Whilst the production is OK, it will never match any of the old or even the recent D'Oyly Carte productions. Had the sound been what we now expect from DVD's, my wife and l would have watched this all the way through, but as it was, we only managed to get to "Three little maids from school". We had then had enough and the DVD is going in the waste bin.

It's startling that this performance was released at all on DVD without a disclaimer on the backside informing the buyer that it is frequently inaudible. I wish I had read the bulk of the ... reviews before I purchased the set, for the warnings in just about all of them are exactly on target. Voices and music veer in and out of focus or range to an alarming degree for a 1990 production. The sound puts me in mind of the hilariously amateurish miking in an early talkie such as the one parodied in "Singing In The Rain." Since the production is such a recent one, I'm left wondering whether the unacceptable sound can in fact be the work of Opera Australia and the Australian Broadcasting Corporation ...

Being brought up on G&S during my youth in England, I was shocked to behold the Opera Australia's production of "The Mikado". I have other dvd recordings of Opera Australia
where I find The Gondoliers and Patience to be quite outstanding.
BUT their version of Mikado is crass, vulgar and cheap.
The scenery and costumes and that unearthly makeup would certainly cause G&S to turn in their graves.
I beg to differ with an earlier reviewer to didnt appreciate the Canadian Stratford version. At least the singing was better
even if the scenery was sparse.
Greme Ewer, whom i enjoyed in the Gondoliers was a poor Ko-Ko.
He stretched the character beyond recognition and his singing voice was unsuitable for his character.
Of the quality of singing and acting, only one singer came shining through. Heather Begg, who is also on the Patience disc, made the most of an otherwise poor production.
The orchestra as usual is top notch, although I fear there were
some alterations to the score. as is also evidenced in the Stratford production.
I will never understand why people have to meddle with perfection. Just leave G&S alone. They can stand on their own ad infinitum and not ad nauseam as some productions are.
I do not believe there are any D'Oyly Carte performances
on video in the US, but if readers want to hear the operettas
on cd there are several D'Oyly Carte recordings available.
And They Are The Real McCoy!!!

After librettist William Gilbert made his visit to the "Japanese Village" in Knightsbridge he found the inspiration for The Mikado: he would "Japanise" the English. The play, as G K Chesterton once observed, "I doubt whether there is a single joke in the libretto which fits the Japanese but all the jokes fit the English", is a witty satire to expose institutional absurdities under Japanese disguise.

First a drop curtain with a pastiche of Old Queen Victoria and various advertisements, then open two doors on the curtain, and come through the "gentlemen of Japan", dressed in grey kimonos (but pinstripe pants), greeting in Japanese, nodding, fanning (but their fans are printed with "The Times"). Carrying their curled-up umbrellas and briefcases, obviously they are riding London's morning subway. The beginning of The Australian Opera's The Mikado sets a nonsensical tone that continues throughout the entire play. The wandering minstrel Nanki-Poo arrives on a bicycle in a Cambridge straw boater to match (or not-match) his patch-worked kimono; Yum-Yum and the schoolgirls' "Three Little Maids From School" emerges from oriental trunks, which are also part of a train that carries the girls...
Unlike the Stratford Festival production of The Mikado, where Japanese sceneries were presented with authentic simplicity but nothing else, Australian Opera's 1987 production is a facetiously imagined Japanese fantasyland, with huge porcelain jars and multitudinous fans. It is a lavish and beautiful production, full of innovations, freshness, and most of all, delight of absurdity that Gilbert originally targeted.
The acting is marvelous, although a somewhat weak link with Graeme Ewer's Ko-Ko, for which the character wasn't projected distinctively. While some leading characters, like Nanki-Poo and Ko-Ko, could sound better and maybe more operatic, Gregory Yurisich (Pooh-Bah), Heather Begg (Katisha), and Anne-Marie McDonald (Yum-Yum) all gave very impressive singing. As Lord High Everything Else, Gregory Yurisich showed his excellent "balancing skill" while carrying a dozen hats on his head "in the cabinet"; Katisha, even "with a caricature of a face", had her moments of subtlety that were portrayed brilliantly by Heather Begg. While the video of the DVD is quite good, the sound recording is not as good, which could be the result of a less satisfactory transfer from original PAL video to NTSC DVD.

This production from the Sydney Opera House in the late 1980s comes across as dated. This may have to do with the production values which have a bland videotape quality and poor sound reproduction. It may have also had something to do with the cast's ad libbing which made reference to Crocodile Dundee and other things Australian that I knew nothing about. I was also disappointed to see that this production was staged in a Victorian motif so that the characters were costumed in an combination of cartoonish Japanese attire blended awkwardly with 1890s British high hats, tails and walking sticks. This was supposed to be amusing but missed the mark for me. I was hoping for a Mikado dripping in elaborate kimono and hairdos that would do a Geisha proud. If that's what you're looking for, don't buy this Mikado.

To the Gilbert and Sullivan purists: It's ok, this was never meant to be taken seriously, even Sullivan didn't like his operettas very much. It's a tradition in G&S to modernize the "little list," exactly because Gilbert was writing to a specific audience. And in these inclusive times, we can be quite a bit more honest about admitting that it's not really Japan, but Victorian England, so the hodge-podgy costumes make perfect sense.

This was, for the most part, a well-sung and beautifully acted Mikado. If Nanki-Poo's voice was a little too light, well, I'm ok with that because Yum-Yum made up for it. Also Nanki-Poo's acting was wonderful, and he was exceptionally handsome. My young daughter prefers this over any other Mikado just to look at Nanki-Poo.

The Koken (silent actors who provide props at crucial moments so as not to break up the action) were wonderful! It was a lovely touch to use them, and in my mind evidence of real research into Japanese traditions. At the same time, the sets and costumes were intentionally overdone, in a way that worked well for me.

While I don't have a copy of the score in front of me, I have been in this operetta and have seen many productions, and have a good feel for the music. It seems this conductor does not believe in the concept of the fermatta. Time and time again, I was ready for a note to be dramatically held only to find he rushed right on. Also I agree with other reviewers that the sound quality could have been better.

I'm pretty much alone in giving this 4 stars, but I recommend it, especially for those unfamiliar with the show.

There is so little to commend this production of the Mikado. While the idea of an "Alice in Wonderland" approach has some promising possibilities, the whole show was so poorly pulled off that any hope of refreshing novelty vanished like the flowers that wither in fall (apologies to WSG). The sound quality is terrible. The acting was appalling. The actors excerized absolutely no restraint in their characterizations. I'm am not a tight-laced G&S follower. However, the energy level on stage was so uncontrolled it looked like a student-directed junior high school production!