Word: operetta
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Viennese operetta, the champagne of the Habsburgs, is doing its biggest U.S. business in years. In Manhattan during the past few months the lilting waltzes of Chocolate Soldier, The Merry Widow, Gypsy Baron, Beggar Student and Fledermaus have drawn throngs of moist-eyed listeners to Carnegie Hall and the Lewisohn Stadium. Produced in German by troupes of Viennese refugees, or in English by personable companies of youthful U.S. singers, Johann Strauss, Karl Millocker and Franz Lehar have played to packed houses for weeks at a time...
...winds up with what looks too much like a prolonged curtain call. The dialogue, on which most of S. N. Behrman's plays depend, is laborious in its humor, forced in its numerous modern references, and "stuck in" like the book of a musical comedy. Songs and dances, stereotyped operetta characters, a gaudily colored scene, and some extraneous fill-in material complete this similarity with a musical...
...seven long years since Soprano MacDonald and Baritone Eddy made a ten-strike with Victor Herbert's sure-fire romantic operetta, Naughty Marietta. I Married An Angel, which is not equipped with the kind of songs (Spring Is Here, I Married An Angel) they can sing, is their eighth picture together. It may well be their last-unless M.G.M. renews green-eyed Songbird MacDonald's golden contract...
Kern: Show Boat: Scenario for Orchestra (Cleveland Orchestra conducted by Artur Rodzinski; Columbia; 6 sides). The Show Boat tunes, some of the bravest in U.S. operetta, were dressed up last year by their composer in symphonic finery at the persuasion of Conductor Rodzinski. The resulting potpourri is lush, places Jerome Kern no whit nearer Beethoven as a symphonist, but Rodzinski's silky performance makes even more apparent Kern's Schubertian gift for melody...
...Ballad Singers was Elie Siegmeister, a dark, merry, 33-year-old Brooklyn composer (May Day for orchestra, We Want the World for chorus, Hip Hip Hooray for NRA, an operetta). Elie Siegmeister talks with a touch of Brooklynese, teaches composition and piano for a living, bicycles to Coney Island for exercise. When he gets interested, he gets interested. When he got interested in balladry eleven years ago, he pored over thousands of songs in the Library of Congress, picked up many a ditty by word of mouth. He now knows 800. He trained his Ballad Singers-six professionals-to sing...