Word: operetta
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...never went to the U.S., but he was scornful about the way American theaters adapted his works. "I compose music about the city I love," he said. "If you want to understand it in New York, you must play it as a Viennese operetta, not as musical comedy...
...Romance (adapted from Edward Sheldon's Romance; music by Sigmund Romberg; book & lyrics by Rowland Leigh; produced by the Messrs. Shubert) gives the effect, with almost none of the enjoyment, of a huge Thanksgiving dinner. It is operetta at its most oppressive. The audience would not have too bad a time if it simply (like Joan of Arc) heard voices; the Sigmund Romberg songs are conventionally melodious and the singing is quite up to snuff. But otherwise the audience has a great deal to endure...
Died. Franz Lehar, 78, operetta composer; of cancer and complications; in Bad Ischl, Austria (see Music...
...TIME, Sept. 27). Unfortunately for Senhor Villa-Lobos, Magdalena seems like its librettists' first encounter with Broadway. They have loaded their book with all the stock melodrama of opera and the seediest monkeyshines of operetta; they have lavished on South America all the tritest features of the tropics and the Balkans. The only thing more incomprehensible than the plot is the notion that any one could follow it. It is a mess of pagan rites, political wrongs, an opera bouffe general (Hugo Haas), vociferous emerald miners, and the love of a bus driver (John Raitt) for a high-born...
...Villa-Lobos, or probably anyone else, to triumph over. It is yet a tribute to him that Magdalena is often something to be enjoyed rather than endured. Some of his music is pleasantly (and all the more pleasantly for being well sung) in the florid, full-bosomed tradition of operetta; while the best of it has real color and wit, is truly folkish or stylish. On the good side, too, are some of Jack Cole's slithery dances, and the genuine if old-fashioned showmanship of Singing Comedienne Irra Petina (Song of Norway...