Word: lehar
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...tell the dancers from the dance? was the question that Yeats posed. In the case of the Australian Ballet's new version of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow, the difference is all too readily apparent. The show, now at Washington, D.C.'s Kennedy Center and scheduled to play in New York and London, is opulently and ebulliently staged; it makes a refreshingly short, diverting summer evening at the theater. But it is not really a ballet. The dancers move through production numbers stitched together by recitatives of mime. They smile brilliantly, toss back their heads...
...Robert Helpmann, 67, the Australian Ballet's director for 50 years. The idea is a seductive one. The operetta, of course, has dancing in it. The score is filled with mellow waltzes and Hungarian folk tunes, complete with mandolins and castanets. The trap for a choreographer lies in Lehar's melodies, which enhance the voice like exquisite garments that are no longer made. No steps danced to Vilia are satisfying, because memory hears a soprano singing...
...inexplicably lifeless; then the whole elegant business simply takes off on a dazzling trajectory, from turn-of-the-century New Orleans and the Basin Street Blues through World War I, the '20s, the Depression and on and on. It is an anthology of Cohan and Gershwin and Lehar and Rodgers and Hart and Hammerstein and Bernstein and seemingly a few hundred others. Every number is a jew el from the national treasury...
...left blonde (Dorothy Collins) who didn't. The bolero-dancing couple (Victor Griffin and Jayne Turner) who bought a Fred Astaire franchise ("Styles change; you never can tell"), the wisecracking queen bee (Yvonne De Carlo) with her hive of young drones; the feathery Continental (Justine Johnston) who remembers Franz Lehar dedicating a waltz to her (" 'Liebchen, it's for you.' Or was it Oskar Straus? Facts never interest me. What matters is the song...
Died. Giovacchino Forzano, 86, Italian playwright and librettist noted for his work with Puccini; in Rome. Forzano won plaudits for his librettos for Puccini's one-act Gianni Schicchi and Suor Angelica, and contributed librettos for such other composers as Mascagni, Leoncavallo and Lehar. Italians also remember him as the dramatist who nursed Mussolini's passion to write, thrice co-authoring plays with H Duce...