Word: fledermaus
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Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus has maintained its position as the most popular despository of frothy melodies which Viennese operetta has given to the general body of Western culture. The romantic triangle of Rosalinda, her husband Eisenstein, and her lover Alfred needs only a good translation to be perfectly comprehensible and extraordinarily funny to an English-speaking audience. The translation used in the South Shore Music Circus production, which opened in Cohasset on Monday evening, lacks most of the virtues of the original German and makes many condescensions to popular taste...
...tasteful, such as jailhouse monologue of Frosch, played broadly but brilliantly by Bernie West. Adele's embarrassingly inept behavior at the ball justifies itself by her status. But the folksy, hail-fellow-well met lyrics of Howard Dietz have no business being used in any production of Die Fledermaus which attempts to capture the flavor of the original or to offer any amount of the necessary stylization...
...second difficulty can be complained of little: the small orchestra necessitated by a theatre-in-the-round can hardly hope to cope with the Fledermaus overture, one of the treasures of light musical literature. All in all, Rudolph Bennet handles his small forces in the pit with considerable skill. The acoustics are good in the South Shore tent, and the voices were audible...
...settings show up well under an especially good lighting system, and entrances and exits are managed exactly on cue without some of the fuss that attends; them in some theatre-in-the-round productions. One could wish for a more authentic, more piquant savor to the lyrics, but Die Fledermaus remains much like Gilbert and Sullivan: there is much pleasure however and whenever it is done...
...Life. Originals are not necessarily good and adaptations are not necessarily bad. Some memorable plays have been drawn from books, notably Life with Father and Diary of Anne Frank. And particularly in the musical field, adaptations have long been the rule, from Die Fledermaus and The Merry Widow to Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady. As Critic Walter Kerr points out: "Adaptations, so long as they are good, still qualify as creative." And other defenders invariably argue that, after all, Shakespeare and Moliere were adapters too. The difference is that the masters took the bare frame of a plot and filled...