Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are such a stock staple of amateur dramatic societies in the English speaking world that one might think they were easy to stage.  They are not.  They are a tricky genre; entirely sui generic and strewn with as many pitfalls as the field at Bannockburn.  The first and greatest is the primacy of the text and, embedded in that, W.S. Gilbert’s relentless guying of English Victorian society.  A director really has to choose to go with that or come up with something really rather different.  In Toronto Operetta Theatre’s new production of The Mikado director Guillermo Silva-Marin hasn’t really done either.  There’s nothing very new in this production which seems to focus mostly on the visuals; streamer twirling and fancy fan work.  One senses the mostly young cast have been left to develop their own characters without a whole lot of help.  It’s a big ask and the result is that much of the time, even when the words are fully audible, one senses the players aren’t really aware of what and where the joke is.  It’s no surprise then that it’s the veterans of the cast who get closest to the essence of the piece.  Both David Ludwig as Pooh-Bah and Giles Tomkins as The Mikado perform with sly wit and excellent diction.  The Katisha of Mia Lennox is quite idiomatic too but perhaps lacking a bit of bite.

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