Word: treemonisha
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...touring Texas Opera Theater, which has successfully made a home in Texas and five nearby states; next month, for instance, Sousa's saucy operetta El Capitan again takes to the road. Gockley is perhaps most proud of the two Houston shows that reached Broadway: Scott Joplin's Treemonisha last fall and Gershwin's Porgy and Bess this week. "Why can't grand opera produce something like Kiss Me, Kate"? he asks. If anyone is going to come up with the answer some day, it could well be Houston's Gockley...
...strike is long. The union's refusal to work while negotiating has postponed Paul Anka's two-week S.R.O. one-man gig on Broadway. He was paying his musicians five times the union rate. Adela Holzer hoped to open Scott Joplin's ragtime opera Treemonisha last week. Now it is in jeopardy, and so is its 37-member orchestra...
This production accepts Treemonisha's old-fashioned charm and innocence without embarrassment. Says Schuller, an expert on ragtime and jazz: "There are certain kinds of primitive art works that must be preserved as they originally were. Treemonisha is one of them. It just won't work if you try to sass it up or modernize it for Broadway." This is easier said than done, especially in scoring the work; only Joplin's piano edition has survived. Schuller's orchestration radiates not just the ring of authenticity but the growl and wail as well...
Corsaro, a veteran director of Broadway and opera, has given Treemonisha a dreamy, timeless feel that softens its awkward edges and enlarges its fable. He and Designer Franco Colavecchia have conceived sets that underline that aura of make-believe. The plantation cabins, for example, are shells that are held up on poles by supers. The rainbow that greets Treemonisha's ascendancy to leadership is an arch of ribbons. Dancers with alligator and bear masks move in and out of the voodoo scene. Louis Johnson's choreography does have a touch of Broadway pizazz. But when those good plantation...
...comfort and security of marriage. His first failed: the former Belle Hayden had no interest in his music, and their baby daughter died in infancy. His second marriage, to Lottie Stokes, seemed perfect, and Lottie stood by him as he exhausted himself and his money trying to get Treemonisha produced. The only way he could get it published was to do it himself. Burned out at 48, Joplin died in 1917 in an asylum from complications of syphilis...