Clearly meant as a companion piece to Criterion's concurrent
Blu-ray Ripperrelease of Mike Leigh's ,
The Mikado (1939) is more the fascinating artifact than compelling cinema on its own terms. It's basically a filmed performance of the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company's version of Gilbert and Sullivan's comic opera, compromised only slightly by Hollywood commercial demands with half-hearted attempts to make it less stagy and more cinematic.
I suspect Criterion originally intended to include
The Mikado as a second-disc supplement to
Topsy-Turvy but that for some reason the decision was made to make this a stand-alone release, albeit one unavoidably tied to Leigh's film, a movie that dramatizes the contentious,
Creative Zen, tumultuous creation of the original production during 1884-85. As Leigh himself notes in a wonderfully useful interview accompanying this
Blu-ray cloner,
The Mikado squarely falls into that category of stagy filmed shows as opposed to more cinematic movie musicals made from the ground-up. The structures and the staging that work so well for Gilbert and Sullivan in live performances don't translate particularly well on film.
What's left is a kind of visual document, albeit an invaluable one, of an only slightly Hollywood-ized record of a D'Oyly Carte production, itself mostly faithful to its 1880s source. As a filmed-comic opera, one can enjoy the preserved performances, the wonderful music, and the gorgeous Technicolor photography and the outrageous art direction and costumes.
The Blu-ray is a knock-out,
single platter, one of the richest 3-strip Technicolor releases in high-definition to date, and the extra features all enhance the viewing experience, putting both the show and this adaptation into historical and cultural context