Toronto Operetta Theatre’s latest offering is a webstream of Emmerich Kálmán’s 1915 operetta The Csárdás Princess (Die Csárdásfürstin) presented here in English with the usual minor tweaks to the dialogue including obligatory Rob Ford jokes, which have become something of a TOT tradition. The plot turns on the fact that an Austro-Hungarian aristo, let alone a second cousin of the Emperor, can’t marry someone with fewer than 64 quarterings on their coat of arms, let alone a cabaret singer. Implausible impersonations etc abound and love triumphs in the end. It’s all entirely harmless for heaven forfend that anything satirical might have made it past the Vienna censorship, especially in wartime. And there’s no sex because this isn’t France. The humour mostly turns on Hungarian antipathy for their Austrian masters. It’s light hearted and very tuneful fun.
If you haven’t already seen it, Glyndebourne’s 2016 Barber of Seville is available for free right now on their Youtube channel. 
Toronto Operetta Theatre are offering a streamed performance of Emmerich Kálmán’s The Csardas Princess. It’s another film made in the Edward Jackman Studio and with TOT’s usual team in charge. The cast includes Lauren Margison in the title role with Michael Barrett as Prince Edwin. The cast also includes TOT regulars Caitlin Wood as Countess Stasi, Ryan Downey as Boni and Gregory Finney as Feri, Rosalind McArthur and Sean Curran appear as Edwin’s parents Anhilte and Leopold Maria.
Feel like listening to something different? Then I can recommend Missy Mazzoli’s 2014 genre defying Vespers for a New Dark Age. Conceptually it reimagines the traditional vespers prayer service with its, perhaps, archaic formality to explore he way we confront technology, ghosts, death, doubt and God in our “new dark age”.
operaramblings 