The Mikado Conquers the World
Published: April 25, 2026
The Mikado’s initial 600-performance run was only the beginning of a lively performing history, for the original show and for its many offshoots. The first of these was the usual bane of Gilbert, Sullivan, and Carte’s existence: a “pirate” company opening in New York shortly after the London premiere.
Pirated productions were sketchy affairs: spies in London copied Gilbert’s printed libretto (sold at the Savoy Theatre) and details of his staging; a musical hack orchestrated Sullivan’s vocal score (nowhere near as well as Sullivan did, of course), which was on sale immediately after the opening night.
The Pirates of Broadway may have been clever, but D’Oyly Carte was cleverer, having rehearsed a second cast in London which somehow secretly sailed to New York. The authentic production opened to great acclaim, and soon vanquished the imposter. New York was, if anything, even more taken with The Mikado than London and the new show became a must-see for Gilded Age audiences. There was rage in fashionable homes for a “Mikado Room” devoted to artfully Japanese bric-a-brac.
For almost a century, there was no stopping The Mikado, at least in English-speaking countries. But it did travel quite well: the D’Oyly Carte Company brought the show to Germany and Holland; it was also a success in operetta-mad Vienna and, a bit later, in Bolshevik Russia, directed by Konstantin Stanislavsky. The Mikado even made it to Japan, but that’s a story for another post.
The show was constantly revived by professionals and amateurs, played Broadway and many American cities as a staple of the D’Oyly Carte Company’s tours, and became a frequently-quoted cultural icon; people who know nothing about “G&S” have heard of “the flowers that bloom in the spring” or the “three little maids from school,” or know what a Pooh-Bah is.
The Mikado reached even larger audiences in the 20th century, as new technologies developed. It was the first Gilbert and Sullivan opera to be recorded, by HMV in 1917, filling eleven 78RPM shellac discs (now available on YouTube). As high fidelity climbed higher and higher, the D’Oyly Carte Company recorded The Mikado six times, up to 1973.
It was also the first G&S opera to be filmed. In 1926, a brief silent film of a few scenes was made; in 1939 The Mikado made it to the big screen in Technicolor, directed by Victor Scherzinger. There were significant cuts, but the movie does preserve most of the D’Oyly Carte stars of that period, including such legendary figures as Martyn Green (Ko-Ko) and Sydney Granville (Pooh-Bah). Nanki-Poo was American, played by 1930s big band singer Kenny Baker, probably as box-office insurance. The D’Oyly Carte Company made another Mikado film in 1966 – very studio-bound but it shows a production performed in authentic D’Oyly Carte style. (And perhaps it also shows a few problems with that “authentic” style – also to be touched on in the next post.)
The Mikado was probably not the first G&S to appear on television; The Pirates of Penzance was presented live in the 1930s, the medium’s infancy. Kukla, Fran, and Ollie gave The Mikado a try in the early ‘50s, with Fran as Yum-Yum; and the show hit prime time color TV in 1960 on the Bell Telephone Hour, adapted and directed by Martyn Green and starring Groucho Marx as Ko-Ko. (Groucho was a lifelong G&S fan and adept at patter songs, as you can guess from the songs in Marx Brothers movies.)
The Mikado remained a cultural touchstone well into the 1960s, at least. Even TV’s Dinah Shore could be confident that her audience would recognize “Three Little Maids” – even sung by Dinah, Ella Fitzgerald, and opera diva Joan Sutherland.
While the original Mikado remained popular, there has always been plenty of room for imitations and adaptations, with a few of them achieving artistic verisimilitude. The most successful of them might be The Hot Mikado, jazzed up in the 1930s by the flamboyant producer Mike Todd and presented on Broadway – and at the 1939 New York World’s Fair - by an all-black cast starring tap-dancer Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. (Yes … it was a very different time.) The Hot Mikado is still occasionally revived (Off-Monroe Players put it on in 2008), with its lyrics mostly unchanged but with its big-band era scoring sometimes updated to reflect more contemporary pop music trends (The Black Mikado, The Cool Mikado, The Reggae Mikado, etc.)
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