You know how everyone seems to have a dusty little folder in the back corner of their brain stuffed with a very small handful of really clear memories from their childhood? Occasionally something prompts you to open up that folder, and there you find a dozen or so freeze-frame moments from various temporal points while you were growing up that for some reason have been preserved and have escaped the expunging effects that time has on memory.

I have one of those moments specifically surrounding the play (or Opera, whatever your fancy) The Mikado.

It’s hazy memory. I was in grade four or five, probably no older than ten. My elementary school music teacher was — as I remember it — holding some role or another in a small town production of the show. I remember a few hundred people gathered in the high school auditorium. I remember fruit punch during the intermission. I remember Mister WhatsHisName in a kimono. But beyond that, it’s all pretty blurry… except that it really is the first live show I ever recall seeing.

The Mikado is currently in a three-show run at the Jubilee, produced by the Edmonton Opera. We took in the premiere showing on Saturday evening, I crashing in on a “girl’s night out” with my wife, mother-in-law, my wife’s aunt, and two of our female cousin-in-laws. I — crashing in and not staying home like the other guys the with ‘the game on’ — because I had this aching need to reconcile that old memory in my brain with the splashy advertising with which I’ve been flirting for the past months. It was there, hanging about, this notion of trying to pick out what — exactly — gave it such a special lock on my memory for the past twenty-five odd years.

The six of us dined on sushi then — after the slow service and delayed bill — raced to the theatre where we arrived (literally) seconds before the curtain rose.

Our last-minute-ness is an important point in the retelling because it meant I hadn’t taken the usual time to read the program… as I normally would when attending the theatre. I was thus (pleasantly) surprised to discover the manga-meets-final-fantasy modernization of the performance — spoiler free — as the cast marched onto the stage in their cartooneque costumery.

The plot of The Mikado is fairly simple, as one would expect in an opera: prince-in-disguise falls victim to both love and the tangled consquences of some harshly draconian laws against flirtation. From there on, any memory I had filed away in that dusty folder from my childhood was of no help. Gone were the kimonos and fans, replaced by pokemon-flavoured hair-dos, royal segways and songs about iPads.

I don’t know if you can still get tickets, or with only two showings left if you will even read this prior to the close of its short run… but we enjoyed ourselves. I really did. Though, I’m still not really sure why that old small-town version has stuck in my head all these years. Maybe it was just the novelty or incongruity of it all. Or maybe it just is what it is… and in twenty-five more years, or so, I’ll again need to hunt down another wild production of the same, and brush off that silly little anecdote about the first show I ever recall seeing.