Topsy Turvy — Studio C

“Topsy Turvy” film review, The Daily Cardinal, December 1999

Regardless of what post-imperial attitudes prevail today, The Mikado, W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Sullivan’s celebrated light opera and the subject of Mike Leigh’s new film, has the many markings of grandeur. Those markings, distilled through the lively insights of Leigh’s script and camera, amount to a cinematic achievement of comparable magnitude.

In producing this affectionate pageant, Leigh has taken his time — much as should be expected in undertaking something of an epic subject — painting a sweeping portrait of late 19th-century England and the delicate milieu of the period’s musical theater as it was long-occupied by London’s Savoy Theater and its company of insecure, (mostly) egotistic stars, backstage hands and implacable front-office director, Richard D'Oyly Carte; and, of course, Gilbert and Sullivan.

Through the light character sketches of the film’s first hour, we learn — or are reminded — that Gilbert (Jim Broadbent) and Sullivan (Allan Corduner) as individuals did not enjoy the same compatibility as their words and music did. In a reverse of the relationship shared by the American songwriters Rodgers and Hart, Gilbert, the lyricist, was sober and austere where Sullivan, the composer, was a sensualist and even something of a rogue. But unlike their American counterparts — one of whom, Hart, the lyricist, bristled at comparisons made between his work and Gilbert’s — Gilbert and Sullivan’s collaboration was not to be eroded by extramusical differences. Rather it was a question, after eight previous operas of comparable substance, of the musical direction their future collaborations would take — if there were to be a future at all. Luckily, The Mikado — a departure as culturally perilous and grandiose as those later made by Rodgers and Hammerstein with The King and I and The Flower Drum Song — solved the issue.

In adopting a single narrative episode rather than accepting the elliptical example set by many older biopics, Leigh is able to produce a work rich with historical nuance and character development. But it isn’t until the film’s final 90 minutes, as The Mikado is coming together on stage, that Topsy Turvy fully comes together on screen. Where Leigh’s film works best is in its well-researched, nearly documentarian depiction of the rigors involved in staging such a production — including Gilbert’s historically factual recruitment of Japanese colonists to “Orientalize” his cast. The staging of the film’s many musical numbers is especially lavish and memorable.

Shot almost entirely in interiors and featuring many remarkable performances (which include the performers, many of them Leigh regulars, singing in their own voices), Topsy Turvy, a true labor of love for its director, more than justifies Leigh’s lush retreat from the gritty, probing character of his previous work.