Mainly Opera and Ballet
Sadly this delightful Viennese operetta was converted into a story set in New York dealing with the criminal underworld. This necessitated wholesale changes to the libretto, and the performers were required to speak in New York accents, which really didn’t work — see my review in The Article.
The delightful music and witty dialogue of this genteel musical has a cutting edge of impropriety. In its new production at Glyndebourne, Merry Widow is true to the original while adapting the German libretto to English with dialogue presenting issues of current concern in the twenty-first century — see my review in The Article.
The opening night of this new production lacked the snap, crackle and pop of Lehár’s music. Yet when the conductor left the orchestra pit to join in the curtain calls, the orchestra continued under a more energetic conductor, and the music suddenly showed the pizzazz it had lacked earlier. On the other hand, Max Webster’s production …
The year 1905 saw the first production of Richard Strauss’s Salome, an opera that remains as dramatically shocking now as it did then, and Franz Lehar’s Merry Widow, an operetta that remains one of the very finest ever written. Congratulations to the Met for getting five-time Tony Award Winner Susan Stroman to put on this …
