Word: operettas
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...operetta tells the tale of two pairs of lovers, each divided by the chasm of class. Sailor Ralph Rackstraw and Josephine, the daughter of his ship's captain, are in love; the captain, however, has bigger plans for his daughter--he intends to marry her off to the Honorable Sir Joseph Porter, the leader of all the Queen's Navy...
With a cast that features opera stars Frederica von Stade (Magnolia), Teresa Stratas (Julie) and Jerry Hadley (Ravenal), as well as a cameo appearance by Lillian Gish as the Lady on the Levee, this Show Boat aims high. "Show Boat was thought of as a dusty operetta, but it is really a moving piece of music drama," says conductor John McGlinn, 35, whose passion for the score drove him to record the Mississippi riverboat musical in its complete 1927 version. McGlinn restored the overture, reinstating three important ensemble numbers and, most controversially, insisting on Hammerstein's original dialogue, which includes...
...worthy cause. What, after all, is the American musical but a transatlantic cousin of the Viennese operetta whose patrimony also includes the harmonic and rhythmic vitality of jazz? The line from Johann Strauss and Franz Lehar to Frederick Loewe and Richard Rodgers is really very short. Far from being an exotic and irrational entertainment, opera is the most vital and popular of musical forms. Is Mozart's The Magic Flute, composed in the vernacular for the Viennese commercial theater, stuffy high art just because it is 200 years old and occasionally performed at the Met? That would be news...
...MIKADO (PBS, Oct. 28, 9 p.m.). Director Jonathan Miller turns the Gilbert and Sullivan operetta into a Marx Brothers-style musical in this English National Opera production, which opens the Great Performances season...
...often enough to buy a Western automobile and finance a princely standard of living when they return home. But most who venture west seek fame as well as fortune. "In Poland I would pass my whole career almost unknown," says Polish Tenor Dariusz Walendowski, 32, an operetta singer who pays the Polish government's Pagart agency 15% of his average $500-a-performance fee at theaters throughout Austria. "I'm just beginning in Austria, but if I have talent, I can see it appreciated now, not after I'm dead...