Word: operettas
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...recording industry. By 1912, 5 million Americans a day were attending a new entertainment called movies. New Orleans echoed with the sounds that were jumbling together gloriously as jazz. Denizens of Tin Pan Alley were polishing the wit and jaunty lyricism of the pop song and revamping European operetta into an original American theater form: the musical...
...gallery in Sardinia, Glimp declared his "revolt against the age-old tyranny of the frame" and produced an oil painting (Nude Stretching) that flowed off the canvas onto the wall and floor and then out the door, continuing some 320 ft. along the sidewalk. In 1911 his atonal lesbian operetta, Gal Crazy, caused a riot in Seville, where audience members mistakenly believed they were about to see a bullfight. His kinetic 1928 novel, Run, Fight, Nap, written using only verbs, anticipated the action films...
...biggest change was the rise of American popular culture: not only jazz and its innumerable variants but also what happened onstage, across the airwaves and on the movie screen. America took the European operetta, fused it with burlesque and jazz and created--through the genius of Irving Berlin, Jerome Kern, Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II and others--a broad, unique musical form. The '20s saw the rise of the Hollywood studio system, which had grown from its humble origins among (mostly immigrant Jewish) nickelodeon proprietors into the most powerful industry for the invention and spread of dreams in human history...
Part of the humor of the operetta has to do with the absurdity of so many of its situations, for instance, when "Orlovsky" claims, "Vee Russians have a motto: chacun a son gout" and sings an aria about it, or when Eisenstein sneaks off to the party by telling his wife (who thinks he's going to jail) that "the tuxedo is the requisite emblem of innocence." But a lot of it is in the English translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin, which one has to admit can be at times clunky ("transgressors taste my fury" or "your face...
...This operetta has been a crowd-pleaser ever since its 1874 debut, when it must have been a shocker. And this production, even to judge by the number of people humming in the Symphony T stop after the show, took a great thing and made it even better...