Word: operetta
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Composer Shostakovich has long been urging a more imaginative fusion of light and serious music by Soviet composers. The libretto of this new operetta (TIME, Aug. 25) has to do with three couples trying to find apartments in Moscow's Cheryomushki district, where huge apartment buildings are being erected to relieve the housing shortage. Included in the cast are a construction worker, a museum guide, an old man who stubbornly refuses to leave his apartment in "Warm Alley" for the new development, and a married couple named Sasha and Masha, who are forced to kiss goodnight each evening...
...also turned out dozens of show albums for the major record companies. In addition, he has built a fine reputation as an interpreter of baroque music, which he claims to understand intuitively because of his experience in "living theater." Currently, he is planning an operetta based on Chekhov's The Boor, recording albums of Broadway overtures (for Columbia), Broadway ballets (for RCA Victor), writing an autobiographical survey of the U.S. musical scene. His breathless commuting between composing and conducting, Broadway and highbrow, has earned him, in some quarters, the affectionate handle of "the Poor Man's Lenny Bernstein...
...musical numbers. Shostakovich has already composed 15. The rest will be ready when the cast comes back from vacation for mid-September rehearsals. This is the first time Shosty has done an operetta, but he has turned out plenty of light music for films, and apparently he is again leaning heavily on safely popular folk motifs. The choreography is careful too; jittery western fox trots have been displaced by waltzes and polkas...
...Hammerstein may worry about their forthcoming Flower Drum Song. But there is one show in the works that simply cannot miss. Title: Moscow-Cheryomushki. Composer: Dmitry Shostakovich. Book: by Vladimir Mass and Mikhail Chervinsky, two reliable party-line pros. Opening is scheduled for December at Moscow's Operetta Theater, but insiders last week got a preview of the vehicle that is to brighten Russia's winter season...
While Noah and family were constructing their ark last week, a crew of ballet dancers in goggles and aprons was busy on a Boston stage, pounding together a Victorian-styled spaceship for a nostalgic trip to the moon. The occasion: the U.S. premiere of Jacques Offenbach's minor operetta Voyage to the Moon, based on Jules Verne's yarn. First performed in Paris in 1875, Offenbach's Voyage caused a momentary sensation among premature space bugs, then disappeared from the repertory and has rarely been seen since. The story, as revived by the newly formed Boston Opera...