Gilbert & Sullivan are to comic opera what Barnum & Bailey are to the circus.
There’s no denying G & S’s success with such shows as The Pirates of Penzance and H.M.S Pinafore.
But success does not equal infallibility.
The Mikado while intended as a satire of English bureaucracy doesn’t hold up in modern times with White actors running around with scotch taped eyes and yellow face.
Yet the New York Gilbert & Sullivan Society apparently is planning to do just that. They’ve announced a one week run of the show during the Christmas holidays at the New York University Skirball Center for the Performing Arts.
Performances are also planned for next week at the Lenfest Center for the Arts in Lexington, VA and The Sharon L. Morse Performing Arts Center in the The Villages, FL.
While the Gilbert & Sullivan Society sees itself as giving “vitality to the living legend” of the comic and music duo, that mission can certainly be fulfilled by producing the pair’s other 13 plays.
Last year the Mu Performing Arts teamed up with Skylark Opera in Minnesota to produce the show without yellow face.
That’s proof the play can be updated for a modern era without resorting to racist caricatures.
This is not the first time the Gilbert & Sullivan Society has encountered this controversy. It was just last year when the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society found itself facing major push back when it produced the show there. That debate attracted national publicity – publicity that the NY chapter of the society undoubtedly has chosen to ignore.
This chapter is not only showing its ignorance, its displaying a total disregard for a significant portion of the New York population. Producing this play is the equivalent of giving Asian Americans the middle finger salute.
Re: Here we go again with the Mikado: Do any modern productions of the Mikado actually use "scotch taped eyes and yellow face"?
Surely there is a significant difference between wearing make-up/prosthetics intended to make Caucasian actors look more "Asian", like in some old Hollywood Fu-Manchu film, and wearing kimonos and wigs in a play meant to be set in Edo-Period Japan (which is something that Japanese actors do too when staging period plays).
It seems to be that most/all Mikado productions actually do the latter.