Friday, March 20, 2009

HOT MIKADO

Billericay Operatic Society at the Brentwood Theatre

19.03.09


Eighty years ago, this very society staged their first ever show, the Mikado. Only ten years later an all-black Hot Mikado hit Broadway, and this was the inspiration for Rob Bowman's ingenious, and hugely enjoyable, re-working.

If Gilbert and Sullivan could see me now …” mused the J Edgar Hoover of Japan [Ian Rainsby’s not very menacing Mikado], as he tapped his troubles away in Act Two. Well, they’d certainly recognize the plot, though it was trimmer and slimmer in this low-fat, full-flavoured version. 

And the tunes, too, though it was here that the really clever changes were made.

So Katisha [a barn-storming performance from Gail Carpenter] had a big Gospel number, and a very witty arrangement of her first entrance, and the Three Little Maids,fronted by Gill McGarry's knowing Yum Yum, owed a lot to the Andrews Sisters.

The coolest cat in Titipu, Poo Bah, no less, was played with sleek charm by Brian Plumb, but the stand-out male performers were director and choreographer Wayne Carpenter as Nanki-Poo, a clean-cut college boy with enormous specs and an ego to match, and Philip Cousins' perfect Koko, neatly capturing a vocal style somewhere between lyric and lounge. His little list included revivalists and ragtime.

The show looked great in this relatively intimate space, with technicolor zoot suits and print frocks; the invisible band, under MD Derrick Thompson, was a constant delight.

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