Word: operettas
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...purists will point out that the Victorian never-never-land of the operetta and the memorable songs deserve most of the credit, but last night's show was a better than main-run performance. Carol Schechtman's direction departs from the traditional background, and with good effect. The small stage never seems cluttered, even with the full cast dancing. The blocking is put to best use in the first act finale, and if the dancing is two-step rich, it is spirited and colorful...
...were allowed to travel past the minefields and machine-gun towers that still guard the border to visit the West. Western authors can now be found in Budapest bookstores (current rage: Graham Greene), and the city's 200,000 television sets roar to the guns of U.S. westerns. Operetta buffs were recently treated to a fine production of Csokolj Meg, Katam-better known as Kiss Me, Kate...
...dimension of this accomplishment is extraordinary because the French do not generally comprehend American musicals. The last one to open in translation there was Annie Get Your Gun (Annie du Far-Ouest) in 1950, and it flopped. Paris audiences expect the pressed sugars of operetta when they go to light musical theater, and they are never quite up to story lines and sociology in song. When the movie version of The King and I arrived in Paris, the theater was all but empty until the exhibitor cut all the music out of the picture; then audiences in sizable quantity began...
Rugantino, a musical transported intact from Rome and sung and spoken in Italian, is a pleasant novelty on Broadway. Unobtrusive English titles are flashed on a narrow screen above the stage to keep the playgoer abreast of action and dialogue. More nearly an operetta than a musical comedy, Rugantino is lavishly and attractively costumed and atmospherically set in Rome in 1830. Its bawdry is innocent, its humor earthy, its love songs are unselfconsciously sentimental...
Died. Marc Blitzstein, 58, satiric composer who jolted even the class-conscious '30s with his pro-labor operetta, The Cradle Will Rock, mellowed slightly after the war (he renounced Communism in 1949, the year his opera Regina appeared), but kept a spare set of sharks' teeth pearly white, dear, for the English adaptation of Brecht's Threepenny Opera, which ran six years off-Broadway, made a jukebox gigolo of Mack the Knife; in Fort-de-France, Martinique, where police charged three sailors with beating him to death...