Word: operettas
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Reaching Manhattan after a taxing flight from France, oldtime Viennese Composer Oscar Straus met his son and daughter-in-law, who persuaded him to sit down at the piano for the first time in six months, strum a few chords from his operetta The Chocolate Soldier. "In Europe," sighed Composer Straus, "the day of the waltz is for the moment ended...
Actually, One Night in the Tropic?, was designed as a major film operetta. Jerome Kern, aided by Lyricists Dorothy Fields and Oscar Hammerstein II, wrote five not-so-melodious tunes for Allan Jones's piercing tenor. Short, jaunty, oldtime Musical Director A. Edward Sutherland conducted the actors through the story by the late Earl Derr Biggers. Top-flight Cinematographer Joseph Valentine ran the camera. Yet together, this combination of Hollywood's ablest backstage talent accomplished no more than a jumbled exaggeration of the Boy Meets Girl motif with scattered comic turns by Radio Zanies Abbott and Costello...
...reasons which the picture never clears up, Alice Faye is cast as Lillian Russell. Queues of top-hatted gentlemen, roomfuls of roses, $15,000 trinkets sent her anonymously by Diamond Jim Brady fail to dent her indomitable domesticity. When Husband No. 1 (Don Ameche) dies of overwork writing an operetta for her, Singer Russell marries Henry Fonda. He has been waiting in the wings all the while, never gets up courage to ask until the end of the picture. In between are the awkward love makings of hippopotamic Diamond Jim Brady (Edward Arnold), who walks through the part, laughing grossly...
...Great Victor Herbert (Paramount) opens with a stern view of the bulgy, bobbing little maestro tripping down the centre aisle of a theatre to conduct a synthetic Victor Herbert operetta. When he turns to make his bow, the audience sees that he is just able, amiable Walter Connolly dressed up to look like the composer. But few people who go to see The Great Victor Herbert will give a tenor's whoop what Victor Herbert looked like. They will want to (and will) hear Allan Jones and Mary Martin sing Victor Herbert's lilting tunes with freshness...
Greater of the two was bewhiskered Johann II, who wrote the Blue Danube and the operetta Fledermaus. One cause of his greatness was the jealous ambition of his mother, Frau Anna Strauss. Her husband Johann, one of the doggiest of Vienna's gay dogs, transgressed (to the extent of five illegitimate children) with an attractive milliner named Emilie Trampusch. Frau Strauss kept a stiff upper lip, concentrated on making her Johann II a better man than his father. So while Johann I gadded about, Johann II composed and practiced the organ in church. His teachers, who expected...