Word: operettas
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...Hammerstein years. Yet if you listen with alert ears and a clean-slate mind, you might think that the R&Ham songs had come first; for they are ripe with sentimental Americana, fashioned in long melodic lines for big, fluty voices, and grounded in the turn-of-the-century operetta form. They seem far more innocent, more remote from our day, than the R&Hart oeuvre...
Taking the form of traditional comic operetta, Patience parodies the Wildean Aestheticism rampant in late 19th century England. As the production notes indicate, there is an emphasis on “fads, fashion and faux-intellectualism...
...isn’t giving much away to say that the operetta ends with all the confusion neatly cleared up and the protagonists paired up and living happily ever after...
...frequently employed solution is to update the action to modern times, in an attempt to drill home the musical’s relevance to contemporary audiences. This production, however, has chosen not to reset the operetta, but rather to emphasize the humorous moments and trusts the audience to draw the fairly obvious connections between the faddism of then...
Point is a nasty part—a nasty part in a nasty show. If Gilbert and Sullivan operettas are as English as a cup of tea (and this is a show that makes its audience sing “God Save the Queen” before the overture), then The Yeomen of the Guard is the cup that got laced. It is operetta on crack. The plot starts off with characteristic gleeful entanglement, but when the time comes to tidy everything up for neat resolution, the miraculous ploys fail and tragedy, usually avoided by a hair?...