Stockyard Savoyard

By JAY COCKS

A rambunctious Mikado is set in modern-day Japan

The elderly lady was so shaken she had difficulty keeping hold of her stainless-steel walker as she made her way around the stage entrance of Chicago's Lyric Opera last week. A musician friend spotted her and inquired how she had enjoyed this new, undeniably upstart production of The Mikado. "Well," she said, mustering her best backstage diplomacy, "it certainly must be fun to do." "Oh, yeah," he agreed. "It's crazy!"

Certainly it must have seemed so to the startled senior citizen, to Gilbert and Sullivan traditionalists--Can there be such a thing as a Gilbert and Sullivan radical?--and to anyone else who expected an orthodox production that was proper right down to the last parasol. There wasn't a bumbershoot of any description on the Lyric stage. No fans either. They were replaced with tokens and totems of the new pan-Orientalism: signs that blink out Sony, Seiko and, inevitably, Coca-Cola; NankiPoo (Tenor Neil Rosenshein), the wandering minstrel, transformed into a rocker with a red guitar; Yum-Yum (Soprano Michelle Harman-Gulick) in a flared short skirt and visor cap, giggling and jawing gum like a Tokyo Valley Girl; and the Mikado himself (Bass Donald Adams), arriving onstage, with all appropriate ceremony, in a Datsun.

All this prankish revisionism, good-natured but a touch self-smitten, is the work of Peter Sellars, 25, the director who has worked similar changes on other classics: Handel's Orlando set at the Kennedy Space Center, King Lear featuring a Lincoln Continental. (Subject for a future master's thesis: Automotive Metaphor and the Sound of Cultural Collision in the Early Work of Peter Sellars.) Sellars clearly seeks not so much to rejustify all these stage pieces as to re-examine them, even reinvent them, for a contemporary audience. What is up-to-date in The Mikado is timeless, but what is charming is essentially antique, brittle as a piece of porcelain. Porcelain is not the ideal material for broad strokes and bright colors.

Sellars and his conductor, Craig Smith, are scrupulous about observing all musical amenities. The scoring combines respect for tradition with a verve that comes within hailing distance of being ideal. The singers perform zestfully, even when Sellars requires the principals to sing lying on the floor, as if they were practicing some new kind of aerobic exercise for the vocal cords. Instead of reinforcing the staging, or indeed placing it in the kind of paradoxical context limned by Brecht and Weill, this straightforward musicality puts the brakes on the rambunctious staging. The rhythms of the songs and the pace of the action are too different, which may be why the single most successful moment of the production is the overture, staged in front of a scrim decorated with the Northwest Orient Airlines logo. Blond air hostesses go through the usual check-out procedures, finding some berserk synchronization between their clockwork movements and Sullivan's ravishing score.

That synchronization is broken when the male chorus comes scrambling on in identical blue business suits. All the flurry and the coy comic extravagance of having Ko-Ko, the Lord High Executioner (Baritone James Billings), carry on like an insurance salesman who has been crushed beneath his quarterly projections set a pace that the singers cannot match. Whatever purists may have thought were its vulgarizations and deficiencies, Joseph Papp's Broadway presentation of The Pirates ofPenzance was all of a brassy piece. This Mikado is too fitful, too ambitious, perhaps--Dare we even whisper it, risking the rage of Savoyards everywhere?--a little too respectful. Crazy? More like not crazy enough.

--By Jay Cocks This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.