Word: operettas
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...Alles aus Naturverstand (meaning "Everything by Common Sense"). Americans in the audience recognized it as Doin' What Comes Natur'lly. Annie Get Your Gun had settled down in Vienna, and its arrival had precipitated another battle in the running musical war between partisans of old-fashioned Viennese operetta and fans of new-style American musical comedy...
...virtue of their Merry Widows, the dignity of their Countess Maritzas and the artistic solvency of their Gypsy Barons. American musicals, said critics, were "pornographic" and not fit for "Kulturstaaten." Furthermore, the government-subsidized Volksoper should be playing native Austrian composers. (Annie's defenders pointed out that native operetta composers have not written a note worth hearing for decades...
Vienna is showing signs of resigning itself to the American era (the Vienna Conservatory of Music even offers a course in American musical comedy). Moreover, incurable operetta addicts are beginning to pretend that there really is not so much difference between the old and the new. Said one dreamy rationalizer: "I can see it all. Let's say Frank Butler is really a Hungarian cavalry officer who had to leave his country-some disgraceful duel over an actress. Annie is really the daughter of a millionaire Chicago meat packer. Call the whole thing The Duchess of Chicago...
...richole, never before done at the Met and rarely seen in the U.S. anywhere, replaced Die Fledermaus as the Met's showpiece operetta and special New Year's Eve attraction. The score is second-rate Offenbach, first performed in 1868, well after the glories of La Belle Helens (1864) and Orpheus (1858); but it is still the work of a master in his field. The libretto is by two hacks of genius, Henri Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy, who vaguely based it (as they did their celebrated book for Carmen) on a work by Prosper...
...Atlantic City, NJ.; the Belmont Plaza in Manhattan), the Americana offers such inducements as a huge, cone-shaped $300,000 terrarium in the center of the lobby (filled with orchids and rare fungi) and four restaurants with the help dressed to fit the decor, e.g., waitresses in Rose Marie operetta costumes for the Dominion of Canada Coffee House, waiters in Argentine cowboy pants for the Gaucho Steak House...