Most operetta fans will know David Slattery-Christy as the biographer of Ivor Novello (1893-1951) and as a tireless champion of
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Eubie Blake: Rags, Rhythm and Race arrives as a most welcome and long overdue biography of pianist and composer Eubie
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A performance of Lehár’s Clo-Clo from the Ohio Light Opera – filmed live at the theater in Wooster – has
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Because of the required commitment of time, money, and dedication, it is a safe bet, with the exception of the
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Today I got asked, for the umpteenth time, ‘what was the first American musical?’ Well, all those three qualifications narrow
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Paul Abraham’s Ball im Savoy opened at Berlin’s Großes Schauspielhaus in December 1932 with a superstar cast – and was
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The record label Palaeophonics is specialized in historic cast albums attractively packed as old The Play reprints of the respective
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In 2018 the score of Hans May’s operetta Die tanzende Stadt (The Dancing City, 1934) came up for sale in
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Franz Lehár’s 1924 operetta Cloclo is not one of his more famous titles, and it hasn’t stayed in the repertoire
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Will Marion Cook was born in Washington, DC, on 27 January, 1869. The son of a well-off and well-educated family,
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In Dahomey was an early American “Negro musical comedy” (in a prologue and 2 acts), one of the first to be
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Karl Kraus und Felix Salten haben 1909 bzw. 1906 Diagnosen zur Situation des musikalischen Unterhaltungstheaters und seiner Rezeption in Wien
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With all this free time at home right now I’ve started working my way through various DVD boxes I’ve had
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Today, 90 years ago on 1 April 1930, the famous film Der blaue Engel premiered in Berlin’s Gloria Palace. It
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Emmerich Kálmáns Graf Tassilo (Gräfin Mariza, Buch Julius Brammer / Alfred Grünwald) verkörpert einen Typus, den das Publikum der Uraufführung
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The folk who created the musical works of Meilhac, Halévy, Crémieux, Hervé and their colleagues, and of the parallel composers,
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The team responsible for that overwhelming hit of 1926, The Desert Song, mined a similar vein for their next collaboration,
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The small theater in Zwickau-Plauen (Germany) presented Victor Herbert’s much-loved Babes in Toyland as their Christmas spectacle and gave the
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How many female operetta composers can you name? Here is one who was also a baroness, no less. Her operetta
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No one can really claim that there is not an abundance of exciting Offenbach literature that has been published since
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I first came seriously in contact with F. C. Burnand’s burlesque, Ixion, when working on my biography of burlesque megastar,
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The one-act l‘île de Tulipatan, written by Jacques Offenbach with his librettists Henri Chivot and Alfred Duru in 1868 for
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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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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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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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Franz von Suppé – das sind ein paar wenige Ouverturen, die man heute noch spielt, seltener in Konzerten, wo leider
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Imagine a world that persistently rewards the rich and powerful while immiserating the masses. Imagine an international paternalist cartel that
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The Operetta Research Centre was, this week, undergoing technical maintenance, in the course of which supremo Kevin Clarke came up
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Ivor Novello’s World War 2 hit The Dancing Years has finally been made available in a ‘first complete recording’ by
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Mind the apostrophes! The recent revival of Paul Lincke’s Frau Luna at Tipi am Kanzleramt is a firm reference point
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Originally produced at Baden-Baden during the 1869 summer season, with the young Mdlle Périer in its principal travesty rôle, La
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Sometimes you read an operetta essay that deeply disturbs you – not because it is badly written or full of
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To say precisely who were the first English dancers to perform the cancan in the English-language theatre is pretty impossible.
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Eine der bekanntesten und weit verbreiteten Gavotten ist die „Stephanie-Gavotte“, op. 312 von Alfons Czibulka. Diese wurde 1880 der Prinzessin
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