In the late 1980’s, between the ages of 11 and 18, I performed on the London Coliseum stage in more 100 performances. I made my debut in 1985 as a treble and played my last performance in 1992. In the Coliseum’s backstage corridors, on that vast stage, before thousands of audience members, I crossed the threshold from child to adult.
The London Coliseum opened in 1904, designed by architect Frank Matcham. It was one of the largest theatres in London and intended as home for variety. Not a music hall, the rowdy, lowbrow form that dominated popular entertainment at the time, but neither a temple of elite, highbrow culture. Something in the middle, something transitional. The Coliseum was intended to house everything the new century might imagine.
In a sense, the building itself is a threshold, a form that didn’t fit its content. Built in the last flourish of Victorian theatrical grandeur, it anticipated a future that never quite materialised. The Coliseum has reinvented itself repeatedly: from variety theatre to home of musical comedies, from cinema to the permanent residence of English National Opera. Over more than a century, the Coliseum has cycled through a number of identities. Like all of us, she still does: evolving, developing. Surviving.
Of all the works I experienced at the London Coliseum, few, I think, have lingered with me as long as Sir Jonathan Miller’s production of The Mikado. Now, writing about musicals from something like an epistemological perspective, I can see that this production, replete with tap-dancing bellboys and high camp performances, first introduced me to the idea that musicals possess a lineage: that their structures and conventions developed over time, stretching back long before the shows I thought I knew. It seems inevitable that this realisation should have happened in the Coliseum, where the theatre of the past, present and future overlap.
Adolescence is largely an exercise in borrowed light. You try on identities the way the moon reflects sunlight, not quite your own, but enough to illuminate the darkness for a while. My all-boys secondary school tried a number of identities of its own. It originated in the middle of the 19th Century as a fee-paying Church school founded by an order of Catholic converts. It then became a grammar school, then voluntary-aided, and then grant-maintained during my time there.
Converts are often more evangelical in their beliefs and stricter in their doctrines. Each school day began with prayer, mass was part of the weekly timetable and, on high days and holy days, the entire school would walk to the Brompton Oratory Church to celebrate the full “bells n’ smells” High Catholic service. I have very distinct memories of assemblies the day before an Oratory mass when a visiting priest would remind a phalanx of teenage boys that ‘self-instrumentation’ was a mortal sin and urge us to go to confession before accepting Communion. The next morning, before service, there would always be a long queue stretching out from the confessional.
It is only when I describe my secondary school to someone else that it strikes me what a peculiar institution it was. But it had a choir, and it is thanks to that choir I had the opportunity to perform at the London Coliseum.
From my first week at school, the choir room was the one safe space I knew. While most of the other boys in my form eagerly anticipated tryouts for the rugby team, all I thought about was choir auditions. The choir was open to all for the first month, giving us the opportunity to experience it for ourselves, see how we got on with the mainly liturgical music, decide for ourselves whether we could wrap our brains around complex harmonies and Latin texts. At other schools the choir tackled Jonah Man Jazz and Dracula Spectacular. At mine, during that first month, we studied Benjamin Britten’s The Golden Vanity, a somewhat sepulchral mini-opera in which a young cabin boy sacrifices himself to save the crew of his ship. I was immediately obsessed with its dissonance and crunchy harmonies. When my trial month was up, I auditioned for a full place and was thrilled to be accepted.
The choir was serious business. We rehearsed before school, over lunch and frequently after school too. Once a month, on Saturday evenings, we would don choir robes over our school uniform and sing full Latin mass at the Brompton Oratory.
Just one month after being accepted into the choir, a small group of us were chosen to sing in the backstage chorus of Parsifal at English National Opera and a whole new world opened up for me.
My life revolved around the choir room. Under the guidance of the choir master, I honed my singing voice, quickly becoming one of the principal solo voices. Inside the choir room I was a star, respected by the older boys, admired by the younger ones. Outside, in the school corridors, on the rugby field or on the cricket lawn, I was a victim. In those first weeks of school the Head of PE rechristened me ‘Nancy,’ a name that stuck for years: I was a pouf, a fairy, a faggot. All the names I had heard whispered were spoken aloud, now given legitimacy by a teacher. I was punched, spat at, stolen from, pointed at, subjected to humiliations and degradations that even decades later remain painful to recall.
But through all this, I had the choir. From Parsifal I went on to The Queen of Spades, Werther, The Magic Flute, Eugene Onegin, Tosca, The Force of Destiny. For years I rehearsed three times a week. Being so frequently absent from school for rehearsal saved me. The London Coliseum became a second home, one where I was treated like an adult, welcomed as a professional, and where experiencing intense emotion was embraced, not ridiculed. I began spending all my time there.
On Saturdays, I would travel into the West End and buy a matinee balcony ticket for £3. Carmen, Xerxes, Faust, Rigoletto, Don Giovanni, Cosi Fan Tutte, I didn’t care what I saw. I would spend my afternoon transported to another world, moved to tears by the beauty of the music. A solitary adolescent, in a balcony seat, crying in the dark, too often attracted the wrong kind of attention from the wrong sort of people. Whatever it was the Head of PE and the boys at school thought they had identified in me, it was apparently obvious to others too.
But the theatre itself never frightened me. Quite the opposite. On those Saturday afternoons, I found the music allowed me to express emotions that, at all other times, I felt compelled to keep locked inside. At one such matinee, I encountered The Mikado.
I can’t pretend the full satirical bite of Gilbert & Sullivan’s comic operetta was instantly apparent to me, but I was immediately seduced by the aesthetic. Miller’s production, which has been revived a number of times both at ENO and across the world, relocates the action from Japan to an English seaside town. I would love to say that this is a neat way to avoid the charges of Orientalism levelled at The Mikado but there remain more than a few reprehensible moments of staging.
The problem is real, not imagined. The Mikado has a history of performers donning stylised “Japanese” costume, makeup and mannerisms, a practice that today we know as yellowface. Nor is this The Mikado’s sole problem. The original libretto contains offensive language, including a racial slur that has long since been excised. The Mikado belongs to a theatrical tradition that included racial masquerade, exotic parody and minstrelsy.
At the same time it is intended to function as a theatrical disguise. The targets are the absurdities of British bureaucracy, class hierarchy and moral hypocrisy. The Mikado’s inheritance requires complex and sensitive navigation.
But at fifteen, none of this was apparent to me. What I noticed was something more instinctive, more personal. At the top of Act 2 Lesley Garrett, as Yum Yum, stood alone in a spotlight and sang The Sun Whose Rays Are All Ablaze.
It is a vainglorious moment. Yum Yum describes first the sun, then the moon. In both cases declaring herself just as brilliant and luminescent. It is as if she is trying on both identities, borrowing another’s light in order to make her own more dazzling.
In the dark of the Coliseum balcony, that felt strangely familiar.
It is a bold and confident aria which, in a score otherwise driven by comic ensembles and satirical display, stands out as a rare moment of character revelation. It feels, in that respect, like an early ancestor of a modern “I Want” song, the moment in a musical when a character steps forward to declare not only who they are, but what they intend to become.
This observation leads us to an intriguing and much-debated question. Were Gilbert & Sullivan, in the body of work we call ‘The Savoy Operas’, writing proto-musicals?
Andrew Vorder Bruegge, in his essay “A Dull Enigma: Historians’ Analysis of Gilbert and Sullivan’s Impact on the Development of the American Musical,” makes precisely this point. The Savoy team of Gilbert, Sullivan, and producer D’Oyly-Carte, over the course of the nine works that make up the Savoy Operas, and the full thirteen canon of their collaboration, perfected the formula for musical theatre that American practitioners like Lerner and Loewe, Rodgers & Hammerstein and even Stephen Sondheim would use as the scaffolding from which their works would come to dominate American musical theatre.
Bruegge identifies that formula as being made up of the following: a long-term collaboration between librettist and composer; the integration of story, music, character and lyrics into a cohesive whole; a finished product designed to have ‘middlebrow’ appeal; “retail theatre” (in which the show itself is an advert for related products like licensing or merchandise); and the delegation of artistic tasks to an extensive staff under firm leadership. He concludes the Savoy Operas were the first “integrated” shows and argues for their inclusion in the accepted lineage of the American musical.
It’s hard not to reappraise The Mikado through that lens. The opening chorus If You Want to Know Who We Are is a standard world-building introduction, Were You Not To Koko Plighted a conditional love song, Yum Yum & Nanki Poo’s courtship the traditional principal love plot, Koko & Katisha the secondary, comic romance, and I’ve Got A Little List a musical theatre patter song. In I Am So Proud and Brightly Dawns Our Wedding Day it also features that most beautiful of musical theatre constructions, sadly one that rarely, if ever, features in modern pop musicals - counterpoint.
Whether or not you accept Bruegge’s point, for me, sitting in that balcony, Miller’s 1920 setting with fey bellboys and giddy maids dancing through a hotel lobby conjured the barnstorming tap ensembles of Anything Goes, No, No, Nanette or Girl Crazy. I recognised The Mikado as a musical.
When The Mikado premiered in 1885 it marked the apex of the British comic-operetta tradition that would, in time, feed into the development of the modern musical. As the era of Gilbert & Sullivan faded, the Coliseum opened, and the emerging forms of the new century began to occupy the cultural space they once dominated. Perhaps The Mikado, like the Coliseum, was a form that didn’t quite fit its content.
A hundred years later I encountered it as a Victorian operetta playing in an Edwardian theatre, staged in a post-war setting, hinting at the structure of a mid-twentieth-century art form. Victorian ambition refracted through Edwardian spectacle; music hall through operetta, operetta through musical theatre. A kaleidoscope of borrowed light.
And in the balcony, a fifteen-year-old - another form that didn’t quite fit its content - trying on identities, reflecting whatever light could be found.