• Folktale: ambitious tailor, prince and princess in disguise

• Asian women and idealized feminity: The Geisha Girl, The Mikado, Turandot, Madama Butterfly. Aida? What, when, where, by whom is The Geisha Girl?

• The story of a son who leaves home to establish himself outside of the shadow of his father's power and authority.

• Bourgeois stories of the necessary punishments that go to ambitious working-class people, self-important and corrupt bureaucreats, and people who want to arrange marriages for financial rather than emotional reasons. Also the Mikado's song about the punishment fitting the crime seems especially bourgeois in its desire to punish by humiliation, as if the real crimes are social ones.

• The nationalist story that the empire tells itself about its colonies. (Japan was not a political colony, but the fact that it considered adopting English as its official language means that the kind of imperialism so familiar to us - cultural imperialism - worked powerfully for the Victorians as well.)

• Sullivan running through his genres?

• The Willow Pattern.

• The Director's conceptualization of it as a comedy of liberation.

• The Director's conceptualization of it as representing a larger theme of marriage in Gilbert and Sullivan's works.

• Execution and capital offenses and true crimes?

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.