No Better Obligato Set For Castrato

For three happy days, from Jan. 18 to Jan. 20, the fanciful Arabian setting of City Center played host to the court of imperial Japan: the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players performed The Mikado, with just the right mix of fidelity and loving revisionism.

Last fall's New York City Opera production attempted a curious sandwiching when they transposed the evergreen escapist parable into the Jazz Age, an undertaking not altogether unlike setting A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court in Japan. No such nonsense here. With the much mourned vanishing of the D'Oyly Carte company--an erstwhile City Center staple--the NYGASP has now become the city's official stalwart stewards of the Gilbert and Sullivan tradition.

This production was up to their usual standard, and the struggle of Nanki-Poo and Yum-Yum to share love against social convention--as well as the salacious meddling of their preposterous elders, who would rather have them themselves--charmed as ever. The set design, by Albere, was gently traditional, with just a touch of kitsch, in the form of the big old red Shinto gate. The costumes, from Gail Wofford and Kayko Nakamura, are true to the tradition set down by Gilbert in 1885 that is one part authentic Japanese expertise and another part Anglo ham, right down to the fans, the sandles, and eyeliner applied with enthusiasm.

Keith Jameson, as Nanki-Poo, minstrel and prince in disguise, boasts the light tenor and 120-watt smile a Gilbert and Sullivan leading man should, and Lau Relyn Watson, who sings his love Yum-Yum, has a slightly thin, very beautiful voice and a face to undergird her songs about how pretty she is. Philip Reilly, the consummate comic bass, applies himself fully to the blasé business of being Pooh-Bah. He gets the lion's share of the revised lines, and he chortles them out fearlessly, con brio: noting the symbols of his offices on his fan, for example, he declares himself not only Chief Justice and Chancellor of the Exchequer, but "executive vice president in charge of document shredding at Enron Corporation." Some of these new lines delight, some fall flat, some are wonderful cognoscenti self-congratulation, and it's difficult not to be charmed.

Oddly, the revival often takes on a courageous tone of cornball humor. It indicts both the audience (Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner, announces his intent to hatchet anyone whose cell phone goes off) and the present administration (Dick Cheney may try to intimidate the "obstructionist" Tom Daschle, but he has not cowed the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players, as jabs against him, the Bush twins, and others amply demonstrate). Dido may lament in Purcell's opera, "To Fate I sue, of other means bereft, the only refuge for the wretched left," but the Players reinject a little radical social criticism into the starchier domains of musical theater.

Melissa Parks as Katisha, the boorish dowager intent on wedding Nanki-Poo, is nothing less than divine. Ms. Parks, a mezzo sometime of the Metropolitan Opera, bedecked in her ensemble of hot orange silks, loud jewelry, fake nails, and fright makeup, has so ravishing a vocal presence that this critic wanted to leap down from the grand tier and beg to whisk her away from both Nanki-Poo and her eventual suitor Ko-Ko. Indeed, I have not enjoyed such a night at City Center since late September 1998, when the National Theater of Greece mounted Medea; the supertitles were out, and they gave everyone in the audience wireless headphones to hear the verses of Euripides in immediate translation like some speech at the United Nations.

For those not immune to having their spirits raised with good humor and rapid-fire wordplay, the Players, tirelessly helmed by Albert Bergeret, CC '70, are unfortunately away from the city for a while--which shouldn't stop the intrepid roadie. In March, they play The Mikado and H.M.S. Pinafore in Westchester. In April, the clubby can see them do The Mikado at the McCarter Theater in Princeton, and more wholesome souls can plunge into the heartland for Pinafore at Luther College of Decorah, Iowa. From May 9 to May 19, the New York Gilbert and Sullivan Players return to the Upper West Side to mount the duo's uncommonly performed Patience or Bunthorne's Bride at Symphony Space.

A treat for anyone who's read Wilde or a few pages of Victorian verse, the operetta dramatizes the romantic struggle between dragoons and Aesthetic Poets that is still relevant today; consider only the contest of hard-partying frat boys against oily comp-lit grad students.

It promises to be a perfect finale to finals.