IN Series Turns 'The Mikado' into 'THE M.A.K.A.DO' in Anti-Tyranny Season

IN Series opens its 2026-27 season this coming weekend with THE M.A.K.A.DO ("Make America Kingly Again"), a radical rewrite of Gilbert and Sullivan's rarely staged operetta The Mikado. The production anchors a season titled "Sic Semper Tyrannis," spanning almost 1,000 years of music history and built around one theme: art's power to unmask tyrants.

The new version, staged by the Washington, D.C. company, moves the action into a gilded Oval Office. The cast of characters includes a "fumbling orange idiot risen from criminal slumlord to Lord High Retributioner Koch-Co," a chainsaw-wielding space junkie Pish-Tush, a drag queen named Ms. Kitty Katishaw who reads children's books, and a surprise Makado who arrives as "a woman and mother... as lady liberty herself." Comedic writer Bari Biern, a longtime writer with the D.C. satire company The Capitol Steps, wrote entirely new song and spoken text.

How do you fix a problematic operetta?

The company's argument, laid out in an essay published by OperaWire, is blunt: opera's canon carries "baggage of histories of oppression, injustice, racism, colonialism." The 19th-century orientalist corner of that canon includes Madama Butterfly, Turandot, Les Pêcheurs de Perles, Lakmé — and The Mikado.

The essay's authors insist these works are not monolithic. "They are their own works, each different and problematic for different reasons," they write, arguing that each requires separate solutions rather than a single template. "What works for 'The Mikado' will not work for 'Madama Butterfly' or 'Turandot.'"

The Mikado itself, they note, was "probably the least 'orientalist' of all such works" — never intended as a portrait of a real Japan, and using Victorian London's idea of "otherness" as a safe distance from which to lampoon British hierarchy. Still, the piece offends, "not just in its words but in the pentatonic patronization of its score even."

THE M.A.K.A.DO strips every reference to Japan from the text. It also replaces the score's Asiatic musical moments with Americana: "Yankee Doodle," "Hail to the Chief," "Stars and Stripes Forever," "YMCA" and "I Will Survive," all reorchestrated for a John Philip Sousa-style town band.

What does this change for the canon?

The company frames cancel culture as another form of tyranny — one the season sets out to unmask. Its position: "the answer from artists and arts institutions must NEVER be cancellation." Instead, the essay argues that "wrestling with the canonical angel, daring to get it wrong and daring to question what really is essential in the work, is the only way to save many of these works."

The critique extends to opera production itself. Companies "adorn traditional musical performances with increasingly abstract directorial concepts to hide the ugliness of our flawed canon," the essay argues, because they fear changing the score itself. "Irreverence is a sacred act."

The essay describes the production as "irreverent, audacious, hilarious, pointed, and full of love for the piece, the people, and our country."

IN Series hopes the production serves as "more of an example than model" — a demonstration that flawed canonical works can be staged with honesty and relevance, piece by piece, each time they return to the stage.