Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #13604 in DVD
• Released on: 2003-09-30
• Rating: NR (Not Rated)
• Aspect ratio: 1.33:1
• Formats: Classical, Color, DVD-Video, NTSC
• Original language: English
• Number of discs: 1
• Running time: 122 minutes

Customer Reviews

The Mikado by Gilbert & Sullivan, D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
I actually bought this as a gift for my mother. She had been looking for it. We checked Amazon and there it was! We've watched it a few times already and love it!
Thank you for the ease of ordering and your selections are fantastic!

Poor Quality of Great Music
This DVD recording of the Mikado has poor quality to the point of not being able to hear and understand the words on good speaker systems. It seems the original analog recording was simply moved to different media.

"D'Oyly Carte!"
Despite problems in sound transfer and of color fading, this is, hands down, still the best available filmed version of Gilbert and Sullivan's delightful comic opera. As others have pointed out, the D'Oyly Carte cast is consistently impressive, including among its principals Valerie Masterson, who went on to a career of some distinction in grand opera, sweet voiced Philip Potter, and those excellent comic patter singers John Reed and Donald Adams. Further, except for the truncated overture, this production saves all of Sullivan's wonderful music and most of Gilbert's witty lyrics and dialogue, both of which are to varying degrees maimed in other versions.

In my view this production does have a serious flaw, though, which should be emphasized: it is essentially not a film, but rather just a stage play filmed in a studio without the inspiring presence of a live audience. It is afflicted, as a consequence, with a peculiar deadness. Watching it, this viewer felt as if he were seeing a theatrical dress rehearsal at which the audience had been asked to sit on its hands. Real audience laughter, applause and even demands for encores after musical numbers might have inspired the actors to better timing and to being more on top of their form during the filming, thus bringing the project successfully to life. Unfortunately, though, no matter what they do or sing, the actors are rewarded here with only a deadly, unvarying silence, the end result of which is to throw the whole project out of kilter.

Still as a record of an incomparable theatrical troupe in its last years, this performance remains a treasure of sorts.