The original cast of The Mikado included Grossmith as Ko-Ko, Rutland Barrington as Pooh-Bah, Temple as The Mikado, Durward lely as Nanki-Poo, Leonora Braham as Yum-Yum, Jessie Bond as Pitti Sing, Sybil Grey as Peep-Bo, and Rsina Brandram as Katisha (Taylor n. p. [section 9]).

On 19 August 1885 Richard D'Oyly Carte's production opened in New York at the Fifth Avenue Theatre. D'Oyly Carte had "tried to beat the many pirate companies which were putting on unauthorized productions by secretly assembling a company and shipping it incognito on a Cunard liner from Liverpool to New York" (Bradley 555).

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"The opera became so popular that on one evening in 1886 there were said to have been 170 separate performances across the United States, no doubt including one in the city of Mikado, Michigan, which was named in that year" (Bradley 555).

Zell and Genee, who wrote the libretto for Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus, translated The Mikado into German (Ledbetter 8). (There have been, of course, other translations.)

The full score of The Mikado was "published in Leipzig in 1898," and the first audio recordings, of excerpts, were made in the same year (Bradley 570 n. 239-74).

"By 1900 [The Mikado] had been performed in German, Hungarian, French, Russian, Swedish, Croatian, Danish and Italian" (Bradley 555).

The first complete recording of the opera was in 1917.

"A jazz version performed in Berlin in 1927 had Nanki-Poo doing the Charleston in Oxford bags and double-breasted blazer and Yum-Yum singing 'The sun whose rays' while sitting naked in the bath" (Bradley 555).

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"One of the more bizarre shows at the 1987 Glasgow Mayfest was a production of El Mikado in Catalan by a company from Barcelona who increased the number of little maids from three to five" (Bradley 555).

In 1938 The Swing Mikado was produced in Chicago with an all-black cast. The Mikado "was the first Savoy opera to be filmed when in 1938 the D'Oyly Carte Company led by Martyn Green as Ko-Ko performed in front of the cameras at Pinewood Studios" (Bradley 553).

In 1939 The Hot Mikado starred Bill "Bojangles" Robinson "as a [tap-dancing], bowler-hatted Mikado" (Bradley 555). This production was revived in London in 1995.

What happened in 1948? It must have been some performance in the United States. This is the performance in which it became obvious that the word "nigger" had to go.

In 1960 Bell Telephone sponsored a United States television broadcast of a production of The Mikado, directed by Martyn Green and starring Groucho Marx as Ko-Ko and Stanley Holloway as Pooh-Bah (Bradley 555).

In 1962 The Cool Mikado, with Frankie Howerd as Ko-Ko and Subby Kaye as the Mikado, was produced (Bradley 555).

In 1986 Jonathan Miller directed the "stylish black-and-white production for the English National Opera" that starred Eric Idle as Ko-Ko (Bradley 553). This production opened in September 1986, and a video of it was broadcast on PBS's Great Performances.

To Act I or Act II of Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.

To the homepage of this Mikado website.

Suggestions, contributions, criticisms, questions? Email Sharon Cogdill.