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Review: Ohio Light Opera — Cole Porter's Silk Stockings (July 19)
July 22, 2013 by Special to ClevelandClassical.com
by Robert Rollin
Last Friday evening the Ohio Light Opera performed Cole Porter's 1955 Broadway musical, Silk Stockings in Freedlander Theater at The College of Wooster. The show jumps between Paris and Moscow to depict a love story between Stephen Canfield, a sophisticated and somewhat world-weary American theatrical agent, and Comrade Ninotchka Yaschenko, a Soviet apparatchik.
Yaschenko is sent to Paris to bring back famous Russian composer Peter Ilyich Boroff, who has overstayed his official visit. Canfield manages Borof and also the dim-witted American diva Janice Dayton, who is in Paris to make an independent film about Tolstoy's War and Peace. Canfield's plan is to use Boroff's communist party-approved Ode to a Tractor in the movie for $50,000, and to take a large cut for his commission.
Porter and his librettists George S. Kaufman, Leueen McGrath, and Abe Burrows add three bumbling but good-natured Soviet agents, several other minor characters, and a troop of chorus girls to the Paris mix to create a frivolously amusing and complex entertainment. [Read more…]
Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Alexa Devlin, Christopher Nelson, Edward Hanlon, Gregory La Montagne, Nathan Brian, Ohio Light Opera, Sarah Best
Review: Ohio Light Opera: H.M.S. Pinafore, opening performance (June 27)
July 2, 2013 by Special to ClevelandClassical.com
by J.D. Goddard
"Beginning in the 1870s, two Englishmen — playwright William S. Gilbert and composer Arthur Sullivan — revolutionized the musical theatre, creating a series of witty, melodic operettas that set a new standard for stage professionalism. Sullivan's music sparkled with fresh melody, and Gilbert's librettos blended silliness and satire in settings that ranged from pure fantasy to the utterly realistic. Innovative producer Richard D'Oyly Carte publicized these shows as "light operas", but by any name, they were musicals — some of the finest the world would ever see in any language." —John Kenrick
On Thursday afternoon, June 27, I traveled to Wooster to be delightfully entertained once again by a musical production of the Ohio Light Opera, the resident professional company of The College of Wooster. This was the opening performance of Gilbert and Sullivan's 1878 operetta H.M.S. Pinafore (The Lass that Loved a Sailor). This season marks the fifteenth time the OLO has counted Pinafore among its 120 productions over the past 35 years.
Filed Under: Reviews Tagged With: Adrienne Jones, Alexa Devlin, Carol Hageman, Edward Hanlon, Ezra Bershatsky, J. Lynn Thmpson, Julie Wright Costa, Kimberly Powers, Michael Banks, Natalie Ballenger, Nathan Brian, Ohio Light Opera, Olivia Maughan, Sara Giray, Stephen Faulk, Stephen Gordon, Ted Christopher
Re•Views
Mack & McGuire's Ghosts of Gatsby at Music Box Supper Club (Jan. 12)
by Daniel Hathaway
Although the turbulent marriage of F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald — self-caricatures of the Jazz Age — has inspired a number of literary efforts in addition to their own near-autobiographical novels, the subject never seems to have been approached through the lens of opera. Composer Evan Mack and librettist Joshua McGuire have stepped in to fill that void with their one-act The Ghosts of Gatsby, commissioned by Samford University (Montgomery, Alabama), where it premiered in November 2018. [Read on…]
Cleveland Orchestra with Bronfman & Welser-Möst (Jan. 10)
While many American orchestras were just beginning to stir again after the holidays, Franz Welser-Möst and the Clevelanders were busy pulling off one of the most impressive programs in recent memory. A neglected Dvořák symphony, a darkish Mozart piano concerto featuring Yefim Bronfman, and a standout among Janáček's few orchestral works served up sequential delights on Friday, January 10. [Read on…]
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