Word: operetta
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Nostalgia has come home to roost on Broadway. For the fourth* time in nine months an oldtime Viennese-type operetta started packing in the customers. This time it was Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow...
...early success was "Tom Thumb," given in 1854, in which Phillips Brooks took the part of the huge princess Glumdalka. Musical burlesques with piano accompaniment were later included in the repertoire, and the first full-fledged operetta was produced in 1882--"Dido and Aeneas." This work, based on the "Aeneid," a work which all the undergraduates had to know cold in those days, included both original and borrowed music and went as far afield as Philadelphia. In 1918, the first show on the modern, grand scale was produced--"Barnum Was Right." The author was Robert E. Sherwood...
...series of cacophonous variations on the first subject. The second movement, valse, combined an absurdly technical display by the soloist with a weak background on the strings. Several abrupt pauses in the final movement punctuated the variations on the G-minor theme. Noel Coward's description of Dukelsky's operetta "Yvonne" as "Yvonne the Terrible" might well be extended to include this concerto...
This hardly seems the right moment for a period musical, particularly one with so much book trouble. A bodacious, bawdacious leg show would be more in keeping with the times. In any case, "Away We Go" is an operetta, pure and simple, at its best, witty and charming, and at its worst, prime for a severe blue-pencilling. Not knowing Lynn Riggs' "Green Grow the Lilacs," the basis of the libretto, one cannot vouch for the faithfulness of the adaptation, only for its unevenness and absurdity...
...turned up this season. One, Brooklyn-born Dorothy Sarnoff (no relation to RCA's President David Sarnoff), got her first break as a finalist in last year's Metropolitan Opera auditions of the air. As Rosalinda, she showed that she is ready for bigger things than operetta. The other, blue-eyed Philadelphia-born Virginia MacWatters, a protégé of famed Soprano Lotte Lehmann, tossed off her tricky coloratura arias with the ease and precision of a knife thrower, set critics to speculating on her rosy future...