Word: lehar
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...Franz Lehar, venerable (74), Hungarian-born Viennese operetta king, composer of Adolf Hitler's favorite operetta, The Merry Widow (1905), was reported under "house arrest" in his Vienna home. Aryan Lehar's only other reported brush with the Nazis occurred three years ago when he refused to obey Nazi orders to leave his Jewish wife...
...Otherwise it was mostly out of a musty old trunk in the attic. There was not one really good farce, fantasy, thriller. Musicals made the season's biggest splash, but their finest sounds were familiar ones: the brilliant Bizet music in the all-Negro Carmen Jones, the lovely Lehar waltzes of The Merry Widow. Possibly barring One Touch of Venus, musicomedy failed to produce a single decent score, and nowhere produced even a halfway decent book. The net result was an unprecedented string of fancy-figure flops-My Dear Public, Jackpot, Artists and Models, Allah Be Praised...
...Merry Widow. Lehar's waltz-drenched operetta revived with opulence and style (TIME...
Visually the New Opera Company's Merry Widow is as up-to-date as a Reno divorce. Smartly streamlined by Director Felix Brentano (a former Max Reinhardt protege) and studded with billowing ballets by George Balanchine, Lehar's masterpiece now looks like something that had just stepped out of a Park Avenue boudoir...
Nostalgia has come home to roost on Broadway. For the fourth* time in nine months an oldtime Viennese-type operetta started packing in the customers. This time it was Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow...