Gilbert & Sullivan's The Mikado

Next date: Thursday, 17 July 2025 | 07:30 PM to 10:30 PM

The Mikado is an enduringly popular comic opera with memorable music, endearing characters and some of the wittiest lyrical comedy in the English language. Featuring much loved songs such as “I’ve Got A Little List” (the better known title of “As Someday it May Happen”), “A Wand’ring Minstrel I”, “Three Little Maids From School Are We”, “The Flowers That Bloom in the Spring” and many more.

Nanki-Poo loves Yum-Yum but she’s betrothed to Ko-Ko, the new Lord High Executioner. When the Mikado (or emperor) orders a beheading, Nanki-Poo and Ko-Ko try to come to an arrangement that doesn’t involve anyone losing their head! However, the arrival in town of the spurned Katisha turns everything topsy-turvy. With melodious mischief and preposterous plots, the tangled web unravels; will the punishment fit the crime?

Gilbert’s imagined Japan was enriched by a London exhibition featuring a Japanese village inhabited by 100 citizens and the European obsession with everything Japanese following its re-opening to the world. The distracting beauty of his Japanese setting allowed Gilbert to get away with poking fun at the staid social norms, absurd etiquette, and weighty bureaucracy of a colonising Victorian England.

This delightful comic opera enjoyed immense popularity throughout Europe where 17 companies performed it 9,000 times within two years of its premiere in 1885. And, in 2006, the Japanese Tokyo Theatre Company presented The Mikado as part of the International Gilbert & Sullivan Festival in England.

Coming to Alexander Theatre, Clayton 17-20 July, and touring to regional Victoria (Queenscliff: 26 July; Stawell 2 Aug; Cowes 9-10 Aug.)

When

Location

If you want help with a booking, details of access services, or venue facilities, please contact the MPAC Box Office on 9905 1111 or boxoffice@monash.edu

Alexander Theatre, 48 Exhibition Walk, Clayton, 3800, View Map

Photo Gallery