Bigger is not automatically better, some claim, and that’s especially true for operetta, or operetta festivals. So just because the
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In Vienna the great operetta artist Rosy Barsony has found her final resting place. The Jewish performer was born as
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The operetta summer festival in Rüdersdorf – just outside of Berlin, down in the south-east – has gone through some
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After having been forgotten for more than 80 year, new interest in Paul Ábrahám’s Märchen im Grand-Hotel is noticeable. You’ll
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No, this is not scheduled as a mid-summer treat to coincide with the various operetta festival productions in Austria: the
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The show title Abenteuer im Spielzeugland might not directly ring a bell. But if you translate it into Babes in
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When I was about eight years old I have vivid memories of my mother doing the housework, continually singing “Oh,
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Imagine sitting under the stars in a beautiful German Schlossgarten, totally relaxed, watching a hugely enjoyable operetta by Emmerich Kálmán
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The original composer chosen für Die lustige Witwe by authors Leo Stein and Victor Léon was: Richard Heuberger. After he
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It is so easy to rip a performance apart. But what do you do if you see perfection? Alright, if
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Jacques Offenbach could not have asked for a better way to curry favour for theatre priveleges than by publishing a
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One cannot call them “reviews,” since I don’t read music, and a performance has to be either very good or
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Would Brother Jacob have been amused? In any case, the Parisian Opéra-Comique (with a hyphen, meaning the actual opera house,
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“More than any other art form, fashion most fully embraces and expresses camp’s exuberant aesthetic, excelling in its ability to
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First you’ve never heard of Grüezi at all, even though the artists who created it are all artists you’ve known
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The 1922 Madame Pompadour is not only one of Leo Fall’s last stage works (he died in 1925), it is
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The Queen of Offenbach’s Bouffes? Oh, yes, I hear the unenlightened nod. ‘Hortense Schneider. We’ve all heard of her’. I:
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Today, in the expanses of Rookwood Cemetery, Sydney, Australia, with only the workmen as witnesses, a vacant-looking plot of earth
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At Komische Oper Berlin, Paul Ábrahám’s ‘last’ operetta premiered in a new production by Stefan Huber, with a newly arranged
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With all the attention being given to Offenbach, it is easy to forget that 2019 is also the bicentenary of
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German regional theatres excel in searching out rarely performed stage works and often breathing new life into them. Le Roi
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Monsieur Marius (Claude Marius Duplany, b Paris, 18 February 1850) was a ‘Frenchman, play producer, actor, raconteur, and optimist’ (they
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Édouard Théodore Nicole, better known as Léonce (b Paris, 12 January 1820) was a slim, bespectacled (off-stage) low comedian with
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In 1847 the young comedian known as Désiré asked Hervé for a two-handed musical sketch to play at his benefit.
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With an Offenbach conference coming up in June in Cologne that includes a section dedicated to “Discourses and Identities” and
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The World Heritage city of Hildesheim, 20 miles south-east of Hannover, possesses a charming, intimate, 600-seater theatre staging opera, musicals
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My journey with Oscar Straus all began when a colleague at a music conservatory where we worked handed me the
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As I sit watching the current TV series Fosse/Verdon, starring Sam Rockwell and Michelle Williams as two show business legends,
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In November 2018 I reviewed a concert performance of Howard Goodall’s Girlfriends, recommending his previous musical The Hired Man which
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Benatzky’s 1930 hit Meine Schwester und ich in a new Wien Volksoper production is totally delightful and enchantingly charming. More
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This admirable young company finished its fifth season with Victor Herbert’s hit, Sweethearts, which opened at the New Amsterdam Theatre
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Finally – and that’s really the only appropriate word for it: finally the updated 1950s movie version of Die Fledermaus,
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Not seen in London since its original production at the Piccadilly Theatre in 1968, when it starred Keith Michell as
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Gertrude Lawrence’s 1941 megahit, Lady in the Dark, groundbreaking in its day for its then novel use of psychoanalysis in
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There’s a wonderful interview with Elisabeth Schwarzkopf in which she talks about her student days in Berlin. She mentions that
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Franz von Suppé – das sind ein paar wenige Ouverturen, die man heute noch spielt, seltener in Konzerten, wo leider
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