Word: operetta
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...presence, as well as a voice, that marks him for the top of the U.S. musical stage. Ardent admirers of Prince's Company and Follies may be startled and a trifle dismayed that he has devoted his formidable skill and inventive energy to what is basically a bittersweet operetta. But then, the only predictable thing about Hal Prince is that whatever he does is the best of its kind. T.E. Kalem
...decades later, New York's front doors began opening to Blake as the composer of such Negro-flavored Broadway musicals as Elsie and Chocolate Dandies. His biggest hit was a startlingly original synthesis of ragtime and operetta called Shuffle Along. Written with Blake's old vaudeville partner, Lyricist Noble Sissle, Shuffle ran for 18 months in 1921-22 and introduced both jazz dancing and Josephine Baker to Broadway. Two of his show tunes were destined to become standards in the pop world and steady royalty producers for him: Memories of You and I'm Just Wild About...
Waltz begins with a singing narration stating that we are about to glimpse Johann Sr., "founder of the house of Strauss." Lyricists Robert Craig Wright and George Forrest make great capital of this rhyme, employing it later when Johann Jr. is toiling over his operetta and the narrator boasts in his brazen tenor: "In 43 days/ Inside this house/ Johann Strauss/ Composed Die Fledermaus...
...Rudolf Friml, 92, prolific composer king of schmalzy, popular light opera in the 1920s (The Vagabond King, Rose-Marie, The Three Musketeers); in Hollywood. Trained in Prague as a classical pianist and composer, Friml moved to the U.S. in 1906 and within six years had written his first Broadway operetta. A master of the improbably plotted, swashbuckling romance, he eventually composed 30 major works that included a string of hit songs (Indian Love Call, Donkey Serenade). When Broadway tastes changed, Friml tried adapting his work to film, but with little success...
...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...