Old Musical in Manhattan

The Mikado (book & lyrics by Sir William Schwenck Gilbert; music by Sir Arthur Sullivan; produced by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company) ushers in yet another D'Oyly Carte visit to Broadway. In a sense, it is always the same visit, as full of tradition and ritual as though the visiting players were visiting royalty. It even seems to fetch the same audiences of devotees. The extravaganzas that once turned Victorian sanity upside down today seem one of the few things still on their feet. Titipu still flourishes, Barataria still stands.

D'Oyly Carte productions are still impeccably starched and smooth. The D'Oyly Carters are roguish, but they are expertly roguish. There were rumbles once over Martyn Green's unbridled, wall-climbing Ko-Ko; today, roars of sanctified laughter greet his agile footwork and fanwork.

The Mikado--though it seems rather like Bartlett's Familiar Quotations set to hurdy-gurdy tunes*--still holds up. Almost all of Gilbert's lyrics are beyond cavil, and the best of them are beyond praise, while Sullivan's music has more to boast of than a string of lively tunes. The first-act finale of The Mikado is not less a triumph of operatic brio for being also intended as a travesty.

*Except that Bartlett's actually fails to include such phrases as The flowers that bloom in the spring, tra la; A source of innocent merriment; A wandering minstrel I, and many others virtually as famous.

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