On the night of Saturday, March 14, 1885, patrons of
London’s Savoy Theatre saw the premiere of William S. Gilbert
and Sir Arthur S. Sullivan’s newest light opera, a comic
romance set in Japan titled “The Mikado; or, the Town of
Titipu.” The librettist-composer duo had already achieved
enormous success in both Britain and the United States for their
eight previous works together, including the still-performed
“H.M.S. Pinafore” and “The Pirates of
Penzance.” In the early stages of the developing world of
musical theater in the late 19th century, a show with the names
Gilbert and Sullivan attached to it was about as sure a popular
theatrical success as a science-fiction film with the name George
Lucas is a cinematic one nowadays. The New York Times covered the
London opening in Sunday’s morning paper, but buried the
short recap about halfway down the third column of page nine,
criticizing Gilbert’s lyrics for lacking “everyday
interest” while still predicting popularity based on
Sullivan’s melodies. Soon thereafter, three different
productions of “The Mikado” opened in New York, and the
show was an instant success. Previewing a revival production in New
York 15 years later in 1910, the New York Times already considered
it to be Gilbert and Sullivan’s “most famous comic
opera.” Today, many consider “The Mikado” the
best comic opera ever written. Clearly, Gilbert and Sullivan had
hit on something hot. But one aspect of “The Mikado”
never quite made sense: If the story is set in Japan, why were all
the performers white? That isn’t to say the producers of the
original productions should have immediately fired their performers
or that modern productions of the show should feature all-Japanese
casts, but as long as racial boundaries didn’t matter, the
doors were open to other versions of “The Mikado” as
well. Enter “The Hot Mikado,” a production of the light
opera featuring an all-black cast that opened on March 23, 1939 in
New York’s Broadhurst Theater. Despite a set that originally
included a 40-foot soap bubble waterfall and an erupting volcano,
the production remains known mainly for its revitalized
orchestrations that capitalized on popular early swing jazz sounds
of the era. It was another instant success, especially when the
cast began to perform four times a day at the World’s Fair in
New York that year. The production eventually surpassed 200
performances, an impressive milestone for the time. Another 50
years later, two men named David H. Bell and Rob Bowman adapted
“The Hot Mikado,” modernizing many of the lyrics and
again orchestrating the score, this time to pay homage to early
1940s jazz legends like Duke Ellington and Cab Calloway. Their
production, “Hot Mikado,” is set in a town that looks
more like Harlem than Japan, continuing the transition of using
“The Mikado” as malleable source material able to fit
any shape imaginable. Tonight, the theater department will open its
own version of Bell and Bowman’s “Hot Mikado” in
the Little Theater for nine performances through June 11.
UCLA’s theater department announced September that it would
perform “Hot Mikado” as its annual musical production,
and the path leading up to its opening night has been as complex as
the history of the show itself.
Act One When Lana McKissack smiles, she does so with her entire
face, her entire body it seems. The fourth-year theater student
can’t be taller than five feet and perhaps a few inches, and
most of her features are scaled down to fit inside such a compact
frame, but a grin slowly beginning to form on the outer edges of
her lips quickly takes everything over. By the time it grows to a
full-fledged smile, ear to ear, perfectly aligned teeth shining,
glimmering almost, inviting you in and refusing to let go,
McKissack suddenly seems much taller. Then she shrinks again as it
fades and you feel sorry for yourself because you know what she can
become. In a way, you’ve fallen in love with her for a
second, but the feeling leaves when the smile does. You want to
bring it back, feel again how you felt when you imagined how she
felt when it was there, and suddenly, though she is the theater
student, you find yourself performing for her, not the other way
around. It’s easy to imagine McKissack flashing that smile to
everyone in the room when she auditioned for “Hot
Mikado” in March. Wearing a dress with a sweater over it so
it looked like a skirt, McKissack had registered for a specific
five-minute time slot, but still had to wait in the hallways of
Macgowan Hall for her name to be called. Around her sat other
people auditioning, all of them her classmates. The theater
department requires every junior and senior in the Ray Bolger
Musical Theater Program to audition for the annual musical,
allowing sophomores to do so as well in this case because
“Hot Mikado” requires a cast of 23. When McKissack
heard her name called, she entered room 1350 alone. After handing
her resume off and introducing herself, she sang 32 bars from the
jazz standard “At Last” and performed a monologue from
a relatively unknown one-act play by Ernest Thompson called
“The Valentine’s Fairy” that she found in the
Young Research Library. Hoping to get the part of Yum-Yum, the
leading female role in “Hot Mikado,” McKissack chose
material for her audition that would highlight aspects of her
performance skills that matched Yum-Yum’s character. She sang
from “At Last” because the range of the song
approximates the singing range of the role, and she performed from
“The Valentine’s Fairy” because of the zany
comedic style of the monologue, in which a woman berates her
boyfriend for giving her chocolates on Valentine’s Day
because she recently started a diet. The practice of matching
audition material to a specific role is a common one, but also a
somewhat risky one. If a show’s director imagines a role in a
specific way and your guess doesn’t match that image, you may
not be considered for a role you could perform based on audition
material alone. On the other hand, if it does match, you have an
early leg up on the competition. For McKissack, it worked. She was
one of four people called back for the role of Yum-Yum. At a call
back audition for a specific role, McKissack would be required to
read and sing from “Hot Mikado” itself, which posed a
problem since she wasn’t very familiar with “The
Mikado,” let alone its jazz-rendition followers. So she spent
her time between auditions and callbacks reading and studying the
show’s libretto, which the department posted online for such
a purpose. After three days of callbacks, she began the waiting
game. Usually, cast lists are physically posted outside Macgowan
Hall, but for the first time in theater department history, the
cast list of “Hot Mikado” was posted online instead.
The decision avoided the frequently awkward confrontations at the
cast board, where people who weren’t cast must immediately
congratulate those who were while at the depth of their
disappointment and those who were cast must console those who
weren’t while at the height of their happiness. Of course,
posting something online also means that someone will inevitably
know the cast before someone else; the department never announced a
specific time the list would be posted, so while some reloaded the
list’s future location frequently, others casually checked
every now and then. McKissack was at work at the UCLA Student Call
Center one Saturday afternoon in late March when one of her
co-workers interrupted her. “Congratulations,” her
co-worker said. McKissack wasn’t even aware the cast list had
been posted yet, but she understood the reference. She had been
cast as Yum-Yum. Rehearsals would start in early April, after
spring break. She smiled at the news.
Intermission In the last three years, the annual musicals that
have concluded the theater department’s seasons have been
“Into the Woods” (2004), “Hair” (2003) and
“Company” (2002), three shows that aside from being
relatively famous are all also relatively contemporary.
“Hair,” the oldest of the three, was written in 1968, a
far cry from the original production of “The Mikado” in
1885. While the development of “Hot Mikado” dates to
the 1980s, the question of the contemporary importance of source
material written when Grover Cleveland was president remains. The
answer may be in the very history that people now consider
outdated. From an academic standpoint, “The Mikado” is
worth studying as a precursor to many of today’s standards of
musical theater. Performing “Hot Mikado” allows modern
audiences to experience the developments Gilbert and Sullivan made
to theater while also providing entertainment. The equation
isn’t perfect, though. In writing jazz music for “The
Mikado,” Bell and Bowman removed Gilbert and Sullivan’s
signature recitative lyric delivery, in which actors would sing by
speaking to the rhythm of the song, focusing more on enunciating
the rhythms of natural speech encompassed in the lyrics than on
singing the melodic pitch or tone of the song. The style allowed
Gilbert to write twister lyrics that challenged both actors’
tongues to keep moving and audiences’ ears to keep up. In one
of the few instances of recitative in “Hot Mikado,”
three characters work their way through the following lines: To sit
in solemn silence in a dull, dark dock, In a pestilential prison
with a life-long lock, Awaiting the sensation of a short, sharp
shock, From a cheap and chippy chopper on a big, black block.
When performed, and especially when performed quickly,
enunciation and clarity become more important than hitting any
note, and the prevalence of the recitative style when Gilbert and
Sullivan wrote allowed Gilbert to write such complex lyrics. Most
of these lyrics derive their difficult charm from rhyme and
alliteration, creating patterns in natural sound that Sullivan
could easily mirror in music. As a result, the two formed the early
foundation of musical theater wit, later picked up by everyone from
Cole Porter to Stephen Sondheim. But no one sings in a recitative
style anymore, and listening to it now sounds musty, as if the idea
of having more than one note in a song hadn’t been invented
yet. It draws attention to admirable lyrics, but who wants to
listen to someone recite “Peter Piper picked a peck of
pickled peppers” on repeat? Porter, Sondheim and others
adapted the lyric style to more traditional singing, and “Hot
Mikado” follows in their footsteps.
Act Two When rehearsals began in April, McKissack suddenly found
herself with nothing to do. After holding preliminary readings of
the show complete with music, director Jeremy Mann began to stage
“Hot Mikado” scene-by-scene from the beginning,
focusing heavily on each scene before moving on to the next. While
many directors vaguely stage a show in its entirety before
polishing, Mann decided instead to stage and polish each scene
individually because of the high dance content in “Hot
Mikado.” Mann made sure everyone on stage knew exactly what
they were doing in a scene before thinking about moving on to the
next, concentrating on the tricky and often dangerous choreography
that has many girls in the air as often as they are on their feet.
Since Yum-Yum doesn’t appear on stage for the first 20
minutes, McKissack had to wait her turn. Meanwhile, rehearsals were
running from 7-11 p.m., Monday through Friday, and 10 a.m. until 2
p.m. Saturday. Soon enough, she was just as tired of rehearsals as
anyone else, but she came to the conclusion that Collin Cooney, a
fourth-year theater student, had the most difficult task set out
for him. In “Hot Mikado,” Cooney plays Pish-Tush, the
leader of the Gentlemen of Japan, who make up the male ensemble of
the cast, and he faced two large challenges inherent in his role
the moment he was cast. First, the vocal range of Pish-Tush extends
into low bass notes as well as high tenor ones, and as a baritone
singer, Cooney would have to learn to stretch his vocal range in
both directions to sing the part. Second, Cooney acts as both a
principal role and a member of the ensemble, meaning he would also
have to learn and perform those complex dance numbers. He began
working with both tasks immediately. In addition to attending
nightly rehearsals for choreography, he did vocal scaling exercises
to softly expand his range in both directions until note by note,
he could sing the part without pushing his voice. When singers try
to sing notes out of their ranges, they quickly lose their breath
support and are forced to try to push the note out through their
throats, causing a visible tension in the jaw and neck as well as
an audible squeaky sound in the note. Ironically, the key to
singing high and low notes is to relax; in a Zen-like way, the less
you try to hit the note, the more likely you are to do so. If the
tension in Cooney’s neck marked his early struggles to hit
notes, so too did his eyebrows, the most expressive part of his
body. Relatively bushy compared to his tightly kept goatee, his
eyebrows rise, fall, stretch and flex depending on what he’s
saying or doing. When excited, they angle upward about 30 degrees.
When puzzled, they scrunch up together and arch dramatically. When
struggling or in pain, as he was when losing breath and reaching
for notes, they go from zero to 45 faster than a new BMW. Though he
moves his hands a lot when he speaks, Cooney’s eyebrows tell
his story, perhaps because he isn’t consciously aware of
them. In the same way it’s easy to imagine McKissack smiling
when walking into Macgowan 1350 for her audition, it’s easy
to imagine Cooney’s eyebrows presenting a whirlwind of
emotions as he later rehearsed choreography in the same room. At
one point in the show, Cooney takes his dance partner, Tanya
Chisholm, by the waist, performs a plie, and throws her high into
the air. Chisholm does a toe touch, which is the equivalent of
doing the splits while airborne, while Cooney then curls his arms
in front of him and catches her on his biceps as she falls, still
touching her toes. It’s a difficult maneuver made even more
troubling by its rapid speed, requiring concentration so ingrained
in the performers that they don’t even realize they’re
concentrating. Learning it must have left Cooney’s eyebrows
more tired than his arms. Mann’s directing technique ensured
that everybody knew the step as second nature before he moved on to
the next scene in the show. But it’s still a complex lift,
and it’s easy to make a mistake. While rehearsing one day in
early May, Cooney accidentally took a small step forward after
throwing Chisholm into the air. He immediately knew something was
wrong, which left him with two choices. Either he step out of the
way entirely and let Chisholm fall to the floor, or he try to catch
her and hope everyone comes out alright. He chose the latter, and
Chisholm landed on Cooney’s shoulders, causing him to wrench
his back under the pressure and sending his eyebrows into a flurry
of activity. He managed to get Chisholm safely to the ground before
asking for a break to walk it off. Almost a month later, he’s
still walking. The sprain sidelined him for three rehearsals, but
between a doctor’s painkillers and plenty of ice, he now has
it under control. It’s not entirely healed yet, but when
it’s opening night, you put these things behind you long
before the curtain rises. Keep your feet planted and arms parallel
to the ground. Relax your voice and hit those notes. Remember cues.
Remember lines. And don’t forget to bow at the end.
E-mail Tracer at jtracer@media.ucla.edu.