The Mikado premiered in London
On this day · 14 March 1885
Gilbert and Sullivan's Japanese-set satire opened to seven encores and ran longer than almost any stage work of its age.
On 14 March 1885, the comic opera The Mikado opened at the Savoy Theatre in London. It was the ninth collaboration between librettist W. S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan, produced by impresario Richard D’Oyly Carte and his company.
Dressed in an imagined Japan, the piece was really a sly skewering of British institutions, with a Lord High Executioner, a wandering minstrel, and a tyrant who makes “the punishment fit the crime.” Audiences adored it: the show reportedly drew seven encores on opening night.
Set in a fantasy Japan, the opera was a comic mirror held up to Victorian England.
The run was extraordinary by the standards of the day, lasting 672 performances before closing in early 1887. Within months the work had spread across Europe and America, where dozens of companies staged it, cementing The Mikado as the most popular and enduring of all the Gilbert and Sullivan operas.
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