Word: operetta
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...addition, through the gay pattern of his waltzes, sung or played with an effectiveness rarely surpassed on a cinema sound track, The Great Waltz lightly weaves a fragmentary legend of the composer's life. The result is an operetta in which, for once, story and score become part of the same picture-the familiar tapestry, this time brighter and more improbable than ever, of life and young love in old Vienna...
That The Great Waltz succeeds so notably in evoking the flowery nostalgia inherent in Strauss's music may be partly due to the ironic fact that world events have made imperial Vienna something more than the stock romantic setting it was when a similar operetta had its Manhattan stage opening four years ago. Certainly, admirers of the new Vienna will find much to deplore in the picture's affectionate portrait of an era when the principal effect of Revolution was that it inspired a young musician to write a march; and when the most important effect of barricades...
...Weill's twenty-two numbers are of the operetta type, hardly exciting with the exception of "How Can You Tell an American" and "The Scars", and are excellently rendered by the chorus; the principals, however, are less successful. Mr. Logan's work is good, but Mr. Mielziner's sets are a disappointment. Decidedly the show's happiest interludes come by virtue of the seven burghers of New Amsterdam...
Before her first appearance in Jones Beach operetta, pretty June Havoc (real name: Evangeline June Hovick), sister of Louise Hovick (Gypsy Rose Lee), announced: "My sister always was the beauty of the family. All of a sudden people tell me I'm beautiful. Maybe the pills I've been taking have done...
...Bouquets (by Eleanor & Herbert Farjeon; produced by Marc Connelly in association with Bela Blau) is a mannerly, mock-genteel operetta of Victorian days which delighted Londoners for almost nine months, will not delight the U. S. so long. It does a fairly good job of trying to eat its cake and have it too: makes gay, simpering fun of itself while it strives after a light-as-thistledown charm. a snows-of-yesteryear nostalgia. Its lyrics are mock and merry-andrew, its tunes (out of such Victorian composers as Offenbach, Balfe and Gounod) softly glide and sway, recalling gaslit ballrooms...