(Production photos by Matt Dilyard)
By Donald Rosenberg
WOOSTER, Ohio – Drive past the corn and the cows and you eventually arrive at the campus of the College of Wooster, where major generals, merry widows, and “bright-golden-haze-on-the-meadows” cowboys have been in residence for more than three decades. Welcome to the home of the Ohio Light Opera, a company like none other in the United States, and one which treats operetta and American musical theater with loving care.
Where else can you take in Victor Herbert’s Dream City and the Magic Knight or Emmerich Kálmán’s The Little King or Jerome Kern’s Oh, Lady! Lady!! (the exclamation points are authentic), or even Irving Berlin’s Call Me Madam? Those rarities are sharing the Ohio Light Opera’s 36th season with three beloved works – Lerner & Loewe’s My Fair Lady, Johann Strauss II’s Die Fledermaus, and Gilbert & Sullivan’s The Pirates of Penzance – at the college’s Freedlander Theatre through Aug. 9.
How devoted is the Ohio Light Opera to its art? From July 29 to Aug. 1, amid the week’s 10 performances, the company will present a festival symposium, “Taking Light Opera Seriously,” featuring such operetta experts as Kevin Clarke, Stefan Frey, Kurt Gänzl, Courtney Kenny, and Steven Ledbetter. A concert will be presented in tribute to the late Richard Traubner, author of Operetta: A Theatrical History, who staged and designed several Ohio Light Opera productions and provided translations and performance editions.
Since 1979, the company has been a destination for aficionados of classic and neglected operettas and Broadway fare performed in fully staged, English-language productions with the original orchestrations (when available). The Ohio Light Opera was founded by James Stuart (1928-2005), a tenor with Dorothy Raedler’s touring American Savoyards before he began to direct Gilbert & Sullivan and friends in stylish productions adhering closely to source material.
Stuart’s successor, Steven Daigle, a faculty member at the Eastman School of Music, has expanded Stuart’s repertoire by adding iconic Broadway works (by the Gershwins, Rodgers & Hammerstein, Lerner & Loewe, Cole Porter, and others) and such history-book items as Noël Coward’s Bitter-Sweet and this season’s exclamation-point-crazy Kern musical.
What sets the Ohio Light Opera apart from other troupes that embrace operetta and musicals is a tightly-packed, eight-week summer schedule of rotating performances featuring young professionals, seasoned singers, and a 25-piece orchestra. They do their thing in a 400-seat theater that allows every word and instrumental detail to be heard and each gesture to be savored. Two longtime conductors, J. Lynn Thompson and Steven Byess, keep orchestral matters colorful and lucid.
The Ohio Light Opera has mounted more than 130 works in its 36 years, including the entire G&S canon and operettas that spend most of their time on the shelf. Although the librettos of many operettas and early musical comedies tend to try patience, the music usually is so enchanting that enduring the verbiage isn’t too onerous.
Happily, the two productions Ohio Light Opera performed on July 19 – both staged to the stylish hilt by Daigle – didn’t have to apologize in any way. Kern’s Oh, Lady! Lady!! (1918) is one of the treasured “Princess” musicals the composer wrote for New York’s 299-seat Princess Theatre on West 39th Street. These works had witty and cogent librettos and tuneful scores that sent audiences happily into the night.
Among the astonishments of Oh, Lady! Lady!! is the song “Bill,” which became a classic of the American songbook when it showed up a decade later in Kern’s Show Boat. The song was cut two days before the earlier show’s opening, a strange decision, especially since the melody is used as underscoring in the Act I finale. The Ohio Light Opera production restores “Bill” to its rightful place near the start of the show, underlining socialite Mollie Farringdon’s deep love for her fiancé, Willoughby “Bill” Finch.
The show’s book, written by the legendary team of Guy Bolton and P.G. Wodehouse, is a typically complicated concoction involving high-society marriage, mixed signals, and a stolen pearl necklace. The plot merges seamlessly with Kern’s indelible ballads and novelty numbers, making it a where-have-you-been-all-my-life? revelation.
Berlin’s Call Me Madam, a fantasy concocted by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse, inspired by exploits of socialite and U.S. ambassador Perle Mesta, isn’t quite as unsung a work. It was a hit on Broadway in 1950 starring Ethel Merman, had an extended national tour starring Elaine Stritch (Merman’s understudy, though she never got to go on), became a 1953 film starring Merman, and received productions here and there. Berlin’s last first-rate score is filled with such gems as “The Hostess with the Mostes’ on the Ball,” “Marrying for Love,” “It’s a Lovely Day Today,” “Something to Dance About” and that contrapuntal dazzler, “You’re Just in Love.”
In the tradition of true repertory companies, Ohio Light Opera cast members alternate as leads, secondary characters, and choristers. One performance’s Eliza Doolittle might be another production’s third soprano from the right in the ensemble of General Stanley’s daughters in Pirates.
The virtuoso in this respect on July 19 was Alexa Devlin, who made a wonderfully earthy and endearing thief in the Kern musical in the afternoon and transformed herself into charismatic ambassador Sally Adams in the evening. Devlin didn’t try to imitate Merman; she was her own giddy ball of fire, with a firm belt and mounds of brash charm. As her love interest, the Lichtenburg official Cosmo Constantine, company veteran Ted Christoph made a dashing impression and used his resonant baritone to aristocratic effect.
Other Ohio Light Opera members did fine double duty, and the vibrant work of the chorus in both performances showed the advantage of having conservatory singers eager to gain stage experience. Few of them are trained dancers, but choreographer Carol Hageman has found ways for Kern’s and Berlin’s music to inhabit their bodies and let them exult in physical goofiness.
Ohio Light Opera productions can be heard on several dozen releases on Albany Records, not all of them well-recorded and most bogged down by every word of dialogue. But the company wins high honors for continuing to hug repertoire that deserves to live and breathe.
For information about the Ohio Light Opera, go to ohiolightopera.org or call 1-330-263-2345.
Donald Rosenberg is editor of EMA, the magazine of Early Music America; author of The Cleveland Orchestra Story: “Second to None”; and former president of the Music Critics Association of North America. He has written for Gramophone, Opera News, Opera (London), and Symphony Magazine, and teaches at Oberlin College and for Case Western Reserve University’s Laura and Alvin Siegal Lifelong Learning Program.
