Sigmund Romberg’s The Student Prince was a huge success when it premiered in New York in 1924. It’s not hard to see why. It’s an undemanding “love versus duty” plot with plenty of tuneful numbers and lots of drinking and drinking songs which must have had a particular appeal during Prohibition!
Toronto Operetta Theatre opened a run of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance at the Jane Mallett Theatre last night.I think it’s got everything one could expect from a modest budget G&S production and maybe a bit more. Bill Silva-Marin’s production is energetic with a lot of stomping, marching and mincing going on which makes the small stage (even smaller than usual as the band is on stage) look lively and busy. The chorus is good and sings idiomatically. The principals also appear to understand the genre and there’s some good acting and good, at times excellent, singing.
Yesterday I caught the last of three performances of Tomás Bretón’s La Verbena de la Paloma given by Toronto Operetta Theatre at the St.Lawrence Centre. It’s a zarzuela. What’s that you may ask. In short it’s the native Spanish form of operetta. Based on what I saw yesterday it has the following elements; a love story with a complication that resolves happily, spoken dialogue, musical numbers including traditional Spanish folk/dance pieces and elements of the commedia dell’arte. These latter included an older man lusting after a much younger girl )actually a pair of them), a jealous lover who is tested by his sweetheart and a bumbling policeman.
A Northern Lights Dream is a new operetta by Michael Rose which premiered this last week at Toronto Operetta Theatre in a production directed by Guillermo Silva-Marin. A new operetta is a very rare thing. It;’s just not a form that contemporary composers seem to take to. There’s far too much spoken dialogue for an opera but the musical language; mostly tonal, often quite beautiful but not afraid to get more abrasive when appropriate, is much closer to that of contemporary opera than musical theatre. So an operetta it is.
operaramblings 