Word: offenbacher
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several Broadway marriage brokers-Librettists Fred Saidy and Henry Myers, Lyricist E. Y. Harburg-trying to unite Aristophanes and Offenbach. Unaware or uninterested that the two are mismated, the matchmakers give their efforts much more sense of ravishment than of matrimony. For plot they have gone to Lysistrata, with its inspired, antiwar idea of having wives lock their bedroom doors to make their husbands lay down their arms. But in production terms that idea has recurrently inspired more bad taste and ponderous bawdry than it was ever worth, and if The Happiest Girl is no more than middling lewd...
...version is still a burlesque of the Greek myth about Helen's abduction from Sparta by the prince of Troy, with a few numbers added from other Offenbach scores, and some of the best songs from La Belle Helene...
...Offenbach problem is that though the music is at least as intoxicating now as it could have been ninety or a hundred years ago, most of the libretti (including the one for La Belle Helene by Meilhac and Halevy) appear to be not for all time but of an age. The most obvious solution to the problem would be a recording or concert performance in the original--and, to most of us, impenetrable--French. But the music is so gracefully opposite to its subject matter that something of precious value is lost when there is no palpable context...
...tenors, but a little bit odd for one of history's most famous seducers. He acts in a manner for which a really first-rate tenor could be forgiven. Morley Meredith, who has some reputation as a concert baritone, sings the priest Calchas sumptuously, giving some idea of how Offenbach's music can sound given the voices it deserves...
...production was obviously conceived as a show rather than a musical evening, but it succeeds only as a program of songs impeded by dialogue--and succeeds none too well at that. Offenbach's works are still visible as theatre, as has been proved by Cyril Ritchard's Perichole at the Met and also by Stephen Aaron's Orpheus at Lowell House, but Albert Marre's Helen fails for want of any vestige of style or finesse. The exhilaration is missing; the champagne is flat, and while flat champagne can be drunk and even enjoyed, it is chiefly notable...