At the conclusion of the wonderful prologue (A Wand'ring Minstrel I), my wife and I broke into applause right there in the den. Can't remember our doing that before. One reason it's so good is that the director found a way to keep it in its stage home without being stagey. The key to this is editing -- lots of fast cuts among faces and angles. Given these, the camera can rejoice in the operetta's stage-centeredness: the chorus can file onstage in glorious pageant and wondrous costume; the singers can face the audience and extend their arms in that wonderful G&S take on the hamminess that underlies the proper Englishman. That's another great thing about this production. It's clearly about how *Englishmen* would look and act if someone transported them to a magical imaginary Japan whose dimensions are constrained only by only the few wisps of knowledge in the *English* mind. The singing is tops, the physical comedy is wonderful, and there's more good feeling in it than in the next 20 Hollywood feel-good movies you'll see.
Review of The Mikado
