The Japan of Pure Invention: Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado

5. Titipu Comes to America: Hot and Cool Mikados

· 121 ·· Chapter 5 · Titipu Comes to America: Hot and Cool Mikados Gilbert and Sullivan’s tuneful fantasies have become a symbol of a very English Englishman’s ironic humor. But not until the all-Race version of their most popular work is heard will Chicago theatregoers realize how American their operas can be. Publicity report for The Swing Mikado The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado reveal not only the close ties of blackface and yellowface but also how the racial dynamics of the opera depend on an imagined locale. Its new settings—an imaginary South Pacific island or a slick gold-and-silver futurism à la Hot Mikado—seem far away from the commodity-laden Titipu of 1885, but there is a similarly therapeutic effect in each, whereby racial play offers novelty, pleasure, liberation , and escape. The infusion of swing music and the pointedly African American casting of The Swing Mikado and The Hot Mikado specifically relocate the opera from a fantasy of Japan to one of the United States, where blackness defines the hip new commodities of choice. The Japan of The Mikado, a space of exotic locale, fantastical characters, and tempting commodities, becomes the backdrop for the imagined amalgamation of black-and-white. As we have already seen, there is actually a much longer history of innovative Mikados in the United States. Blackface minstrel parodies from 1885 onward adapted The Mikado to satirize American politics, such as in the characterizations of Carncross’s Minstrels: Alvin Blackberry, a “smart Coon, chairman of the Ward Committee”; Whatdoyousay, a Japanese “Black and Tan”; Grover Tycoon Cleveland, the “big Fly Coon from Washington”; a Japanese “no account”; and “as a special curiosity,” a “few honest New York Aldermen.”1 An advertisement for one of the several versions of The Mikado simultaneously running in Chicago in October 1885 listed Haverly’s Home Minstrels performing “Mr. R. N. Slocum’s new 122 TITIPU COMES TO AMERICA local burlesque on the mikado,” High-Card-O!, whose characters included the “High-Card-O of Chicago, not so contented with life as he might be, because of the harrassin’ circumstances attending a late municipal election ”; “Yankee-Pooh, his son, disguised as one of Haverly’s Minstrels”; “Ko-Ko-Nuts, a West Side Pawnbroker, High Sheriff of the Ninth Ward”; and “Waukesha, a middle-aged damsel from Wisconsin.”2 These early parodies all used the comic unruliness of blacked-up performers to satirize figures of authority. Minstrel burlesques of The Mikado, like other parodies of European opera, appropriated and mocked high art forms from Europe.3 From the 1890s onward, wayward productions of The Mikado increasingly emphasized a tension between the yellowface classic and the riotous and “barbaric” energies of blackface minstrelsy. These productions played openly on the possibilities for different racial contrasts of yellow and black: foreign and domestic, decorous and unruly, unintelligible and all too familiar. In doing so, they resituated the fantasy of Japan in the United States. More serious spin-offs, such as Mathews and Bulger’s 1899 “ragtime opera” By the Sad Sea Waves, described as “a mixture of airs from The Mikado and popular ‘coon’ songs,”4 also associate Gilbert and Sullivan’s quintessentially English opera with specifically American forms and locales. Versions of The Mikado reset in the United States also circulated in Europe. One of the more notorious is described by A. H. Godwin in the Gilbert and Sullivan Journal as an “appalling travesty,” seen in a Berlin theater in December 1927: Imagine Nanki-Poo Yankee-ised in flannels and blazer! Imagine Katisha entering in a real motor-car and in a tailor-made of bewildering pattern! One gets resigned to anything. Thus, the Charleston is jogged by a troupe of semi-clad damsels as the first act curtain falls. It rises on the second act to show an absolutely naked girl bathing. Clearly, she is meant to be Yum-Yum, and her conspicuous ablutions precede her adornment in bridal attire. . . . Usually Sullivan’s airs are used very much as we know them until they reach the sound and fury of a kind of ultra-jazz “tail piece.” This sends the trumpets and saxophones and other tortuous instruments crashing. In fairness I must say that the orchestral playing, like much of the chorus work, was at times unusually good, and some num- TITIPU COMES TO AMERICA 123 bers I have never heard made half so impressive (and artificially...