Word: operettas
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...contrast, spectacle abounds in Princess Ida, the spring operetta offering of the Gilbert and Sullivan Players. Aside from the Hasty Pudding musical, the operetta has the largest budget of any student production, and the shows usually show it. I op notch voices are frequently displayed as well...
Strauss built his operetta around the flimsiest of comic opera conventions, but it's loved nonetheless for its infectious waltzes. No matter what performers do to this durable music, it will intoxicate listeners. Lowell's Fledermaus refuses to take Strauss's joie-devivre seriously--which is no sin in itself--but director J. Scott Brumit fails to provide a substitute, leaving the show to wander in a wasteland of farce, sarcasm, and tastelessness...
...these quirky ideas conflict with each other and Strauss's score. Worse, they muddle even further a typically inane--though enjoyable--operetta plot. "Fledermaus" means "bat," but the title has almost no relation to the story of marital cheatings, mixed identities, and revenge. In fact, as the plot wanders from Eisenstein's home to Orlofsky's ballroom to the local jail, you realize that it's all just an excuse for the dance music. In the famous trio "So muss allein ich bleiben" ("I must remain alone, then"), Rosalinda--whom Gretchen Johnson plays with vocal agility but no sense...
...Fledermaus. Johann Strauss distilled the spirit of Imperial Vienna into an operetta with the intoxicating effect of champagne. Unfortunately, Lowell House Opera's production takes a cast of basically fine voices and runs them out of Vienna, and into a wilderness of farce and tastelessness...
Beyond making themselves understood, however, some of the cast falter, unsure whether to play the operetta utterly deadpan--letting the audience laugh at these ridiculous characters--or to reveal that they, too, know the whole thing is a joke. Catherine Weary's sparkling Josephine holds the stage through sheer vocal perfection alone--she could probably handle Puccini with ease. Donald Hovey's Ralph Rackstraw, too, has a full, clean tenor. Now, admittedly there isn't all that much anyonecan make of the milquetoast roles of the love-struck couple; but both Weary and Hovey shuffle between dead seriousness and deadpan...