Word: operetta
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...OPERETTA SHOWCASE. Strauss, Gypsy Baron...
...novelty but its lukewarm popular reception intimates that such experimentation will be curtailed. This is unfortunate because smaller operatic groups ought to be daring where the large-scale expensive enterprises that the Metropolitan must attempt prove impossible. The second work this season will be Offenbach's well-tried operetta Voyage to the Moon, which was prepared by Miss Caldwell for the Boston Arts Festival in the summer of 1956. One can only hope that the spring offering, yet to be announced, will fulfill this group's responsibility to imaginative repertory. After all, they have a purely subscription audience...
...fact, lie less in its cast than in its direction and production. Where the original was visually stark and grimy, the remake, splashed with incongruously cheery color, has the phony patina of Palm Springs. The sets and scenery (some of it filmed in Bavaria) suggest a Victor Herbert operetta rather than German bourgeois society. And the hardbitten, even morbid truths hammered home in the German version become soft and mawkish half-truths under the hand of Hollywood's Edward Dmytryk, who has consented to a happy ending that makes the teacher's tragedy merely pathetic...
...mistress had its world premiere in Boston twenty-four years ago, to critical acclaim but only moderate public support. After Gershwin's untimely death in 1937, it was successfully revived on on Broadway by Cheryl Crawford in 1942, with the important addition of occasional dialogue. In this more popular operetta form, it has since become a part of our musical heritage and an international box-office success...
...impressive boxes with brass fittings and color-dripping illustrations. Another and more daring approach is to look for obscure, rarely or never-recorded works. Part of the recent growth of operatic exotica is London's Giuditta (three mono and stereo), the principal serious effort of Vienna's operetta master, Franz Lehar, who had lifelong pretensions to grand opera. First produced at the Vienna State Opera in 1934 when Lehar was 63, the work has to do with a Carmen-like doxy in an unidentified southern fishing town who heaps misery on herself and her one true love...