History – The Harvard-Radcliffe Gilbert and Sullivan Players

Happy Ides of March! Yesterday, Brad A. Latilla-Campbell ’16 notified me of yet another G&S reference he’d found in The West Wing. Clearly, Aaron Sorkin is a fellow Savoyard. Coincidentally, our blog post this week also features a Gilbert & Sullivan cultural reference, albeit of a … vastly different medium.

Written by Ned Sanger

1868-skirt-lengths-girl-ages-harpers-bazar — Harper’s Bazaar c. 1900

Gilbert and Sullivan show their plump faces in all sorts of places. I recently discovered one of the most absurd: a sordid passage in Chapter 5 of Ulysses. It begins when Mr. Leopold Bloom, the hero of the book and a cuckold, catches sight of a lady across the street. She is about to step into a cab, and he knows that as she does she’ll have to lift her dress slightly, which will briefly expose her silk stockings, as well as a slice of upper calf, or so he hopes. Continue reading “Did Gilbert and Sullivan Wear Silk Stockings?” →

Written by Ashley Zhou ’17 and Kat C. Zhou ’17

We distributed this document at the box office during the run of the show. Some of the responses to the FAQ have been revised slightly in order to clarify and enrich my original answers, which were written in haste before opening.

A Brief Historical Note

The history of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado, as with so many beloved Victorian cultural artifacts, is a history of imperialism: Western imperial powers’ thirst for dominance in an economic system they saw as a zero-sum game, the ever-growing urgency to find more trading partners, the dehumanization of non-white peoples as justification for conquest couched in paternalistic rhetoric of civilizing missions and Christianization. Of Commodore Matthew Perry docking gunboats in Tokyo Bay and calling the result of his actions, even to this day, an “opening,” as if to read choice into Japan’s forced entry into Western-controlled systems of trade and to turn away from the violence of that historical moment. Of the political upheaval of the Meiji Restoration, a direct response to this act of U.S. imperialism, and the economic consequences of the new government on Japanese people, many of whom emigrated, in the first large-scale Japanese migration to the U.S., to find opportunities on the West Coast or in Hawai’i, itself under the rule of white settler colonists.

Continue reading “Mikado 2016 Historical Note & FAQ” →