Gilbert & Sullivan: The Mikado (1960)

Chronique

In 1960, The Bell Telephone Hour produced an hour-long adaptation of The Mikado featuring Groucho Marx as Koko, and this CD documents that production. Squeezing an operetta that lasts nearly two hours, with dialog, into 53 minutes (leaving seven minutes for commercials) requires some drastic revisions, and that thankless job fell to Martyn Green, one of D'Oyly Carte's most celebrated Kokos. The dialogue is trimmed to the barest minimum required to explain the plot, and although only one entire musical number is left out, most of the rest are radically truncated -- not only are whole verses gone, but frequently a line or two within a verse is cut, altering the musical and poetic structure and making listening a jarring experience for anyone familiar with the work. The rationale behind this was that any sacrifice was worth making in order to give Marx an opportunity to play Koko. Initial critical reception tended to fault his performance either for being too clownish, or not clownish enough. There may have been visual pratfalls that made his Koko unique enough to warrant building a production around it, but Marx offers little evidence on the soundtrack to justify the project. The vocal idiosyncrasies are there, and some occasional real humor, but generally his performance is stiff and lacks spontaneity. Marx vacillates between singing and speaking the songs, and his singing is inaccurate enough to raise questions about his familiarity with the music. Some of the other principals are very good: Robert Rounseville as Nanki-Poo, Stanley Holloway as Pooh-Bah, Dennis King as the Mikado, and especially Helen Traubel, who is marvelously over-the-top as Katisha. Overall, though, this is a recording that would interest only the die-hard Groucho fan.
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