Word: operettas
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Lloyd Webber's rise to prominence is something of a historical anomaly. Since the heyday of Gilbert and Sullivan and the demise of the Viennese operetta, the leadership in musical theater has belonged to Americans. British musicals, when they were considered at all, conjured up images of aging vaudevillians with straw boaters and canes barking strophic ballads at nodding pensioners. That has all changed. Now, not only a stirring new work like Les Miserables but even a relic like Me and My Girl can be shipped across the Atlantic from London to win a passionate following on the Great White...
...more right than this! If this isn't the right part, then there's nothing. I'll be doing game shows. I'll be saying ((and here he imitates Sajak)), 'Show me the vowels!' I'll be playing third hunchback in the musical of Notre Dame. ((Sings in operetta style:)) 'Look out, he's going,/ He's got a hunch...
...that musical theater is once again where the action is. Composers of all stripes are finding that the blend of playacting, poetry, stagecraft, dance and music can be as vital and communicative as it was 300 years ago in Renaissance Florence. The label for this art form -- originally opera, operetta, musical, even Broadway show latterly -- matters not. Nor does the increasingly arbitrary distinction between high art and pop culture: Stephen Sondheim's Pacific Overtures and Sweeney Todd, for example, have joined Gershwin's Porgy and Bess in the repertoires of English and American opera companies. It is a truth that...
...this musty, dusty atmosphere of doom that director Peter Sellars '80 is trying to drive away with his production of Handel's Julius Caesar. Updated, polished, and stocked chock full of yucks, in Sellar's hands this baroque warhorse becomes a close cousin of a Gilbert & Sullivan operetta. Or two or three or four operettas. This production is four hours long. Granted, Handel wrote music as God meant music to be, but the theory that "Excess is best" holds only for sex and money...
Some of the problems could be solved by a cast and conductor with a better sense of style. Others, though, will remain. Much of the operetta's bibulous humor depends on a generous tolerance for drunk jokes, but these times do not find inebriation quite as amusing as formerly. Further, Director Schenk's maladroit adaptation of the libretto is not particularly funny, although his appearance as Frosch, the tipsy jailer, has a couple of comic moments amid the prevailing tedium. But Die Fledermaus should soar and sparkle, not merely be endured...