"With Aspect Stern and Gloomy Stride"

On Friday, a friend and I attended the Seattle Gilbert & Sullivan Society's production of The Mikado.  The Society has produced a G&S comic opera each year since 1955.  Of the seventeen operas, The Mikado has been the most produced; this year's was their tenth production.

This year's production was perhaps the best and most enjoyable I've ever seen done -- of The Mikado or of any of the other works in the G&S canon.  The singing was excellent, the acting hysterically funny, and the staging beautiful and imaginative.  The cast, director, and orchestra received a standing ovation.  Everyone left smiling and talking happily.

But not "everyone," apparently.  On Monday, the Seattle Times carried a lead article by Sharon Pian Chan on its Opinion page.  The article was entitled "Yellowface in your face."

Ms. Chan compares the opera's use of white players to play ridiculous Japanese characters with allowing a white actor to portray a black character  "with shoe polish smeared all over his face."  She objects to black wigs and white face powder, bowing and shuffling, and fans a-fluttering.

"The Mikado" opens old wounds and resurrects pejorative stereotypes.

The caricature of Japanese people as strange and barbarous was used to justify the internment of Japanese Americans during World War II.

With all due respect to Ms. Chan's sensitivities, and with due respect for the painful fact that Japanese-Americans living in  the Seattle area were major victims of the World War II internment -- someone needs to get a grip.  And a sense of humor, which is another way of saying "a sense of proportion."

As the column writer herself observes, W. S. Gilbert's libretto was intended as a pointed satire of political and social foibles in Victorian England.  Mr. Gilbert had never visited Japan.  Both he and his audience would have considered any claim that The Mikado was an effort to present an accurate portrayal of tyranny in then-contemporary Japan to be every bit as absurd as a claim that Shakespeare's The Tempest was an attempt to illustrate the difficulties facing poor souls shipwrecked on Bermuda.

Gilbert's Japan was a fairytale setting, just as fanciful as the Black Forest settings in the Grimm's fairy tales.  The faux-Japanese setting looks like a fairy tale world, and is received by the audience as a fairy tale world.  This production even incorporates a line in the traditionally improvised patter, "I've Got a Little List," that observes the absurdity of American actors with fake British accents, pretending they are Japanese.

Asian-Americans may still face problems in America, but those problems have nothing to do with a perception that they are "strange and barbarous."  A more serious problem may be one once shared by American Jews -- a concern by universities that they are being offered a greatly disproportionate percentage of freshman admissions.  This is a fairly "high class" problem, one not shared by "strange and barbarous" peoples.

As one re-reads the entire Chan article, one begins to suspect that alleged slander of the Japanese isn't her real concern.  She suggests that the Society work with local Asian-American theater groups to "re-interpret" and -- presumably -- supply the cast for The Mikado.

We are beyond the point, I like to feel, where blacks and Asians are unable to perform white parts.  I recall, as just one example, that young boys of all races have performed the title role in the Broadway production of Billy Elliot -- the story of a Geordie-accented boy in County Durham.  It's a little late in the day to be upset by white actors portraying Asian characters -- or who use makeup in so doing.

Go see The Mikado for yourselves.  Enjoy it and don't feel guilty.  You aren't being racists in so doing.