corroborative detail

One odd side-effect of spending time in the company of The Mikado is that one begins to notice the holes and other odd points in the plot. For this, I'll revert to the standard text, as you won't have access to the Ducato version.

Ko-Ko, Pooh-Bah, and Pish-Tush seem more flustered by the letter from the Mikado than they ought to be. Yes, his threat to reduce Titipu to the rank of a village is surprising and dismaying, but the reason for it - that there have been no executions for a year - is, it ought to be mentioned, something they deliberately engineered. Go back to Pish-Tush's song, "Our great Mikado, virtuous man." Executions for flirting seemed excessive to the Titipu town fathers, so, the last verse explains, they short-circuited the process by appointing Ko-Ko as Lord High Executioner, because he was "next to be decapited." No other executions can take place until after his, and he can't execute himself, so the whole chain is held up.

But now they're talking about whether he could execute himself, which if he could would have eliminated the reason for appointing him.

Also, we've apparently forgotten that finding a victim shouldn't be a problem. Ko-Ko's got a little list! He's got a little list! Why don't they turn to that? Well, it appears elsewhere that "flirting is the only crime punishable with decapitation" (Ko-Ko to Nanki-Poo, Act 2, just before "Here's a how-de-do"), so the entire little list is meaningless. But this isn't said; the list is just dropped as if it didn't exist.

It's essential to the plot that Nanki-Poo wants to die, he doesn't mind being executed. In a farcical comedy, this brushes aside the depth of the despair he must be in. We had last seen him exiting sorrowfully after the sad duet with Yum-Yum "Were you not to Ko-Ko plighted" and when he comes back he's about to commit suicide. He must want Yum-Yum desperately.

This brings up the question, how much does Ko-Ko want Yum-Yum? He objects to Nanki-Poo marrying her for a month, and had already said "To think how entirely my future happiness is wrapped up in that little parcel!" But he also says, "Really, it hardly seems worth while." And when the Mikado is about to arrive, Ko-Ko gives Yum-Yum up to Nanki-Poo without any hesitation at all.

Speaking of despair, note that Katisha has not one but two soliloquies about her sadness and loneliness ("The hour of gladness" and "Alone, and yet alive / Hearts do not break"). Gilbert is often accused of mocking her, but he does also give her a say and reveals that she has feelings too. What the production I just saw showed is that if you have a really really good singer in the role, she can pull these often-ignored laments off effectively.

Going back a step to the revelation that, when a married man is beheaded, his wife is buried alive. Yum-Yum raises her opposition to this in a most hesitant manner, as if she fears she has no right to object, but Nanki-Poo is in entire agreement with her. Ko-Ko, however, seems to think she's some sort of hypocrite for objecting to being buried alive. Why? That wasn't in the contract she'd agreed to, or Nanki-Poo either. The song "Here's a how-de-do" is about the dilemma the two are in - "I must die without a wedding" - but Nanki-Poo had agreed to be executed on condition that he marry Yum-Yum first; this new and unacceptable condition voids the contract. That would leave Ko-Ko without a victim, so it ought to be he, not the others, who's in a dilemma (as he amusingly is at "The flowers that bloom in the spring").

The most exquisite moment of comedy comes when Ko-Ko, Pitti-Sing, and Pooh-Bah are told that the man they've executed is the heir to the throne. It's all the funnier because they haven't actually executed him but they can't say so. The Mikado insists that he's "not a bit angry" about it; he should be played so that this is true, and he usually is. It's already been established that he's completely without familial affection, having already ordered Nanki-Poo to marry Katisha "or perish ignominiously on the scaffold," and Nanki-Poo, telling Yum-Yum this, compares his father to Lucius Junius Brutus, the Roman consul who executed his own sons for rebellion. So it isn't just Katisha who's "just a little teeny weeny wee bit bloodthirsty."