Theatre / Utopia, Limited

Utopia, Limited; or, The Flowers of Progress is an operetta by Gilbert and Sullivan, first performed in 1893.

The operetta is set on the fictional Pacific Island of Utopia, ruled by the reform-minded King Paramount, who is eagerly awaiting the return of his daughter Princess Zara from England so she might help him institute a thorough Anglicization of their country. She brings along the Flowers of Progress, consisting of five visiting English gentlemen and two English military officers (including her new fiance, Captain Arthur Fitzbattleaxe), to teach the Utopian populace all about the glories of English (and sometimes, though not always, Irish) society. The king meanwhile pines after Lady Sophy, the English governess to his two younger daughters, Nekaya and Kalyba. She returns his affections in secret, but cannot bring herself to act on her feelings because of the reports of his dissolute doings in the Utopian society papers, and his unwillingness to execute their author if they’re untrue. Little does she know that King Paramount himself writes them under the duress of his two wisemen and chief judges, Scaphio and Phantis, who use this to blackmail the king into ruling as they please- for if any of this news ever escapes the society papers, the king will be liable to being blown up by Tarara, the Public Exploder, who stands to inherit the throne if Paramount fails the moral test. But when the Flowers of Progress suggest the ultimate in English modernity for Utopia and have it remade as a limited liability company, the wisemen realize their grip on the throne may be under threat…

The operetta thereby holds up a satirical mirror to various aspects of English society, including (as the title indicates) the then-new concept of the Limited Liability Company.

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Utopia, Limited contains examples of:

• Actually, I Am Him: Why can’t King Paramount boil the gossip writers falsely accusing him of all kinds of scandalous behavior alive? Because he’s the writer (under duress of the two wisemen)!
• Affably Evil: Parodied by King Paramount. "A king of autocratic power we", he's actually pretty affable, full-stop, and everyone simply (approvingly) pretends as though he's an evil despot because that's what a Western king is meant to be.
  • And then it turns out even his alleged moral shortcomings are all things his chief justices force him to write about himself so they can maintain power over him.
• Beta Couple: Oddly, Fitzbattleaxe and Princess Zara, despite being the ostensible romantic leads, are this to King Paramount and Lady Sophy. Paramount and Sophy overcoming the obstacles to their Happily Ever After is a major subplot, while Zara and Fitz are already an established couple when they first appear onstage, and nothing challenges that (except for Scathio and Phantis’s abortive attempts to woo Zara, which she and Fitz handily deal with as soon as it comes up, and perhaps the short-lived rebellion against the Flowers of Progress, which is similarly swiftly solved).
• Blatant Lies: Nearly anything the Flowers of Progress, and to a lesser degree Lady Sophy, say about England. Examples (particularly in "Society has quite forsaken") include the imminent abolition of hunger and the absence of slums.
• British Royal Guards: Princess Zara's escort identifies itself as "First Life Guards".
• Continuity Nod:
  • Captain Sir Edward Corcoran, KCB is presumably a relative of the Captain Corcoran in H.M.S. Pinafore, if not actually the same man. (If it is, he's dropped several vocal ranges, among other changes. On the other hand, he is accompanied by the characteristic exchange "What never?" "No, never." "What, never?" "Well... hardly ever!"). Maybe it’s In the Blood.
  • King Paramount mentions that he is engaged in a correspondence with the Mikado of Japan on the subject of "a punishment ... that will exactly meet the enormity of the case” (though he’s a much nicer guy than the Mikado, and doesn’t seem to take any advice he must be getting from him into account).
• Cool and Unusual Punishment: The Wise Men's use of a pound of dynamite exploding in your ears, according to "In every mental lore". As they say, "It's not a pleasant sight — We'll spare you the particulars."
• English Rose: Spoofed. Zara’s little sisters are raised by their English governess to be properly modest and retiring English roses until the visiting "Flowers of Progress" assure them that the English fashion is quite different nowadays:
  A wonderful joy our eyes to bless,
  In her magnificent comeliness,
  Is an English girl of eleven stone two,^note 156 pounds, or 71 kg
  And five foot ten in her dancing shoe!
• Ensemble Cast: There are a whopping seventeen named speaking and singing roles, most of whom are on stage at the same time so they can't be doubled. ^note For contrast, H.M.S. Pinafore and The Pirates of Penzance each have nine plus chorus. That coupled with the fact that most of them need at least two wardrobe changes probably has something to do with why Utopia isn't staged as often as other G&S plays.
• Foreign Culture Fetish: The Utopians desire to be like the British in every way. This is Gilbert's way of satirizing the uncritical adoption of British ways by its colonies, most notably India, as well as English society itself.
• Foreign-Language Tirade: Tarara, the Public Exploder of the Kingdom of Utopia, enters raving in his native language ("Lalabalele talala! Callabale lalabalica falahle!").
• Gone Horribly Right: Spoofed. The reforms lead to boundless prosperity and the elimination of wars and all disease — which leads to complaints because it's put the nation's military and all its doctors out of work.
• Gratuitous Iambic Pentameter: Some passages.
• Irrelevant Act Opener: Act 2 opens with a song parodying tenors before getting on with the plot.
• Looking for Love in All the Wrong Places: Lady Sophy sings a lament that this has been her experience throughout life, and she’s never found a man who lives up to her romantic dreams. And then it turns out King Paramount does!
• Lyrical Dissonance:
  • "First You're Born" is about how a character's life is one big joke played on him by the universe. It's done as a comic number.
  • "A tenor, all singers above" is a classic tenor ballad — about how the tenor can't sing, complete with intentionally flubbed high notes.
  • "It's understood, I think all round" and "In every mental lore" are both cheery songs with lines about grisly deaths (by duelling and being blown up by dynamite, respectively).
• Majored in Western Hypocrisy: Utopia's crown princess Zara has been studying at Girton College, Cambridge, for five years. She returns to her Anglophilic homeland with several English advisers in tow and a plan to remodel Utopian society in England's image.
• The Man Behind the Man: The two chief judges' only job is to judge the king himself- if he's found to have any shortcomings, he'll be exploded with dynamite. (They have a whole guy for that.) They take advantage of this situation by keeping the king under their thumb and force him to write daily gossip rags spreading scandalous stories about himself, because threat of exposure of these stories could lead to his execution.
• Meaningful Name: King Paramount is not only the ruler paramount of his country, but fits the secondary meaning of the term (Incorruptible Pure Pureness) too, despite all of his insistence that he's an autocratic despot (and being forced to slander himself in society papers daily).
  • Captain Fitzbattleaxe's name suggests both extreme toffiness- "fitz-" as a prefix usually denoted a noble line descending from an acknowledged and titled illegitimate son of a king- and his (alleged) total dedication to being an army officer. ^note It's also a rather dirty pun. Take the meaning of "Fitz" above, and then consider that "battle-ax" is also an old slang word for an overbearing and aggressive woman, as in Battleaxe Nurse. He might as well be named Captain Bastard-Son-of-a-Bitch!
  • Two of the Flowers of Progress, Lord Dramaleigh (who oversees stage performances) and Mr. Goldbury the finance minister.
  • Tarara the Public Exploder. Tarara as in Ta-Ra-Ra-BOOM-De-Yay.
• Minstrel Shows: The king of the Utopians convenes a cabinet meeting with his English advisers and asks how such meetings are handled in England, for the Utopians desire to be like the English in all ways.^note A major target for Gilbert's satire in this operetta was the uncritical adoption of British ways by its colonies, most notably India. The meeting proceeds in the style of a Christy Minstrel act. The scene's song, "Society has quite forsaken all her wicked courses" uses a minstrel show tune with original lyrics. The advisers do not wear blackface, if only because doing so for just the one scene would be logistically impractical in a stage play, but many productions put the Utopians in brownface or simply cast actors of appropriate ethnicities if such are available (though see Race Lift below for exceptions).
  King Paramount: We take your word for it that this is all right. You are not making fun of us? This is in accordance with the practice at the Court of St. James?^note A royal residence where formal receptions were held, and later a generic reference to the royal establishment
  Mr. Dramaleigh: Well, it is in accordance with the practice at the Court of St. James' Hall.^note A music hall where minstrel shows were performed
• Opening Chorus: "In lazy languor motionless", which describes the status quo in Utopia before the arrival of the Flowers of Progress.
• Pair the Spares: While it’s certainly been performed with this kind of ending (it’s a Savoy opera, after all), there’s actually no textual suggestion that this take place, in particular between Princesses Nekaya and Kalyba and Mr. Goldbury and Lord Dramaleigh.
  • One production in New York City in 2023 made Goldbury and Dramaleigh a couple, and their praise of hearty English girls’ beauty solely into encouragement to the princesses to be themselves.
• Patter Song: The chorus of the song "Society has quite forsaken all her wicked courses," commonly sung while slapping tambourines, minstrel-style, is the perfect example of G&S-esque patter. And yes, they do sometimes perform seemingly interminable encores.
• Pardon My Klingon: Tarara, the Public Exploder of the Kingdom of Utopia, enters raving in his native language ("Lalabalele talala! Callabale lalabalica falahle!"); the Utopian maidens all cover their ears when they hear this shocking language, all the more shocking since a royal decree has abolished the Utopian language in favor of English. Tarara nevertheless insists he has no choice but to the Utopian language for venting certain feelings of his, having learned from British education that the English language has no such strong expressions.
• Poor Communication Kills: Sophy refuses to love Paramount because he’s either really committing the scandalous actions he’s accused of in the palace gossip papers, or he’s refusing to punish someone lying about him. Paramount can’t clarify things for her because he’s the one writing them, under (somewhat convoluted) threat of death. It keeps them apart and pining for most of the show.
• Race Lift: Not all productions stick with the original intent of Utopia being essentially a fantasy version of a Polynesian country and depict it instead as, for just a few examples, an idyllic faux-Grecian Arcadia, an untouched pastoral realm stuck in the Middle Ages, or even an anachronistic kingdom of Crystal Spires and Togas. These allow the residents to be played by actors of any race without Unfortunate Implications (as well as giving non-white, non-Polynesian actors more of a shot) while still preserving the joke that it's better off at the beginning than the England it wants to imitate.
• Recycled In Space: See Race Lift, above. Due to the targets of the original satire being far more remote nowadays, and one in particular having ended tragically in real life^note the Royal Family of Hawai’i’s mania for all things Western, including sending Princess Kaiulani (Zara’s probable model) to school in England and promoting her in the press as the perfect hybrid of Hawai’ian and Western beauty and elegance, ended in the overthrow of its monarchy by the United States government and Kaiulani’s early death, it’s common for Utopia to be presented as a different kind of very un-English society in different stagings.
• Saying Sound Effects Out Loud: Princess Zara sings "tantantarara-rara-rara!" as an onomatopoeia for a blaring trumpet.
• Second Love: Lady Sophy, for King Paramount (presumably; the princesses’ mother(s) are never mentioned).
• Star-Crossed Lovers: Sophy and Paramount are a very silly version of this, as the only things keeping them apart are Paramount being forced to whip up Poke the Poodle-level scandal items for himself in the local society paper (which he buys up in its entirety with every published edition) and Sophy being unwilling to either countenance any such undignified behavior or bear being with a man she thinks is excusing lies being written about him (to say nothing of their both being middle-aged).
• Suddenly Suitable Suitor: Parodied. Zara mentions in passing that it’s convenient that Captain Fitzbattleaxe turns out to have been Switched at Birth with the prince of a foreign land to whom she was engaged as an infant, because it means they can be married. It never comes up again, and Fitz never assumes the role of anything but a very English army officer.
• Tenor Boy: Captain Fitzbattleax, one of the Flowers of Progress, and the love interest for Princess Zara. Lampshaded in a song where he worries that being in love is affecting his ability to hit the high notes.
• Unspoken Plan Guarantee: The wisemen plot to overthrow the king's company, but do all their plotting by whisper, concluding:
  At last a capital plan we've got
  We won't say how and we won't say what:
  It's safe in my noddle—
  Now off we will toddle,
  And slyly develop this capital plot!
• Villain Song: Scaphio and Phantis, aguably the only real or 'straight' villains in the G&S ouvre (nearly all 'villains' in G&S are actually subversions, parodies and the like) get two villain duets.
• Vocal Range Exceeded: Captain Fitzbattleaxe, a comic exaggeration of operatic tenors, opens the second act with the song "A tenor, all singers above". In the introduction to the song, he sings, "Ah, do not laugh at my attempted C!" where the C in question is an octave above middle C and either at the very top of or beyond the range of most tenors. Depending on the production (and the talents of the singer cast in the role), he may (deliberately or otherwise) fail miserably at hitting the high C or render it in a falsetto voice for comic effect.

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