Had I had the misfortune of being in the audience, for that desecration, I would have stood, BOOOOOOed, delivered a few "salty" words, and stomped out of the theatre, demanding my money back!
"Butterfly, butterfly"....HUNH; "Poor Butterfly", something from "Madame Butterfly", something else, not G&S at all?
There have been two ( that I know of )all Negro versions of The Mikado; one in the late 1800s, but done correctly and one, "THE HOT MIKADO, in 1939, that was mucked up, which I don't approve of at all!
Then Jonathan Miller came along with deJapanesing, COMPLETELY, his version and another stab at it all, moved to the boardrooms of BIG Japanese firm ( the name of which escapes me at the moment. The later was coming to the Chicago Opera House...which does NOT ever give refunds. Well, I had tickets and when I heard what was what ( hadn't known when the I purchased the tickets ), I called and demanded a refund. They weren't going to give it me, until I told them what I would do, if no refund was forthcoming; which it suddenly was on its way to me! I'm the ONLY one, that I know of, to have EVER gotten a refund, EVER, for ANY reason, from that theatre.
Well like it or not, a lot of modern G&S productions are doing those little asides. Some of them pretty funny in my view and some not so funny; especially in Mikado productions where Trump and conservatives find themselves on the Lord High executioner’s “little list”. The Brits, who always seem to have some sort of production going on in some town and village have been “modernizing things”...too much in my view...to keep things “relevant”.
Me...well you’ve already seen that I can “adapt” G&S phrasing and skewer progressives. There’s just something in the music, the rhymes schemes(to which I stay loyal, and the sarcasm that allows such skewering of progressives to be done!...
And as for who it was that may have “fondled” Blasey Ford”...”ehrr right....it was the cat!”