Word: operetta
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...like to call it operetta," said Actress/Singer Edie Adams. "If I say opera I get scared." Scared or not, the blonde comedienne, who did takeoffs of Marilyn Monroe on her late husband Ernie Kovacs' TV show in the '50s and later made "Smoke Me" commercials for Muriel Cigars, was finally making her debut at the Seattle Opera. "I feel opera is my real voice," confessed Soprano Edie after her performance in the title role of Offenbach's La Perichole. "Just think of 72 people on the stage, all singing. Sometimes I feel I must have been born...
...lyrics changed to "I'm thirsty, I'm thirsty/For the beer we used to know./I hear the gentle voices cal-ling,/'Have one, Joe.' " The truly grand finale featured excerpts from March King John Philip Sousa's El Capitan, an operetta that triumphed in 1896, then vanished into obscurity, leaving only the famous title march to mark its existence...
...billed as "the youngest prima donna in captivity," she joined the touring J.J. Shubert operetta company, starring in Gilbert and Sullivan the first season and in The Merry Widow and The Countess Maritza the second. More dubious engagements followed on the borscht circuit and at a private after-hours club in Manhattan, where she wheeled a piano around the room and performed light classics for tips that sometimes totaled $150 a night. In response to Papa's pleas that she at least devote herself to grand opera, she signed with the Charles Wagner Opera Co., a provincial touring unit. Opera...
...scene befitting a bad Khmer operetta. There in the dock were the children of the deposed god-king, on trial for their lives. The judge, a rotund man given to spasmodic eyeball rolling, was the same judge who a year earlier had condemned their father to death in absentia. At the end of each day's session, scores of the curious spectators who filled the drab, stifling courtroom would nervously make their way to the two defendants, many prayerfully clasping their hands before their faces in the traditional Cambodian gesture of respect...
...book's most unconvincing passages occur when Sajer, on Berlin leave, falls in love with a little rose-and-cream operetta type named Paula. He is far more credible when he writes of buddies like the huge, permanently hungry Hals: "We discovered a comradeship which I have never found again...