Word: operetta
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...rendezvous, as it happened, was one of the most improbable in recent Met history: back to the stage after a grateful absence of 32 years had come the glass-beaded old operetta known as Martha, or The Fair at Richmond...
Strauss: Die Fledermaus (Hilde Gueden, Erika Köth, Regina Resnik, Giuseppe Zampiere; the Vienna Philharmonic under Herbert von Karajan; London, 3 LPs). This otherwise fine recording of the imperishable operetta classic offers a strange side effect. One moment, the listener is tapping his feet to the most tap-pable of old Viennese waltzes; the next, he is caught up in the English rhymes of I Could Have Danced All Night, sung by Birgit Nilsson, of all people, in ponderous and chesty style. In the midst of the second act party scene, the producers have inserted anachronistic "entertainments" sung...
From Liszt to Lehar. Frederick Loewe grew up in a musical-comedy world. His father, Edmund Loewe, a Vienna-born operetta tenor, was the first Prince Danilo in the Berlin production of Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow, the Fair Lady of its day, was also Berlin's first Chocolate Soldier. Fritz's mother Rosa was the daughter of a Viennese Baumeister (builder) and a sometime actress who used lipstick and cigarettes in a never-never age when young ladies only pinched their cheeks for color, also added color to her life with a swift and exotic imagination...
From his home in Bronxville, N.Y., Jerome Kern would call up Hammerstein in Great Neck, L.I.; then he would set the phone on his piano and bang away at the keyboard while the greatest American operetta grew along the wires, as Oscar picked out the pure Kern from the blip-blap-bleep of the Bell System, and made preliminary notes for such Showboat masterpieces...
...survivors are headed by Little Mary Sunshine, a boffo operetta satirizing the Kern-y, Friml-ous past; The Balcony, Jean Genet's world view through a brothel window; The Connection, a pad full of hipsters seeking to prove that the opiate of the people is heroin after all; and a skillfully acted double bill of disenchantment: Samuel Beckett's Krapp's Last Tape, in which a beaten and lonely ex-writer poignantly and often amusingly grovels in his past, paired with Edward Albee's Zoo Story, in which a desperately lonely beatnik attempts the hopeless, tragicomic...