by Daniel Hathaway
HAPPENING THIS WEEKEND:
FRIDAY: Ohio Light Opera (2 pm, Brigadoon in Wooster) | Stars in the Classics (6:30, A Summer Garden Concert in Orange | Piano Cleveland (6:30, Forte Fridays in Westlake | Chagrin Arts Blind Injustice (7:30 in Playhouse Square, sold out. Pictured: Brian Keith Johnson, Tim Culver & Marian Vogel).
SATURDAY: Athena String Quartet (12 Noon in Cain Park) | Ohio Light Opera (2 pm, Carousel in Wooster) | Cleveland Silent Film Festival (His People, 1925 with live score at Main Cleveland Public Library) | The Cleveland Opera (4 pm arias and duets at Darl Center in Cleveland) | The Cleveland Orchestra (7 pm Carmina Burana at Blossom) | Ohio Light Opera (7:30 Tip-toes in Wooster) | Chagrin Arts (7:30 Blind Injustice in Playhouse Square).
SUNDAY: Ohio Light Opera (2 pm, Brigadoon in Wooster) | Chagrin Arts (3 pm, Blind Injustice in Playhouse Square) | The Cleveland Opera (4 pm arias and duets at St Cyprian in Perry) | Stars in the Classics (4 pm, A Summer Garden Concert in Orange | Music at Bath (5 pm Hunter Skeens and the Forerunners. Original Bluegrass at The Bath Church).
For details visit our Concert Listings.
WEEKEND ALMANAC:
By Jarrett Hoffman
A 1,088-page book published a few years back is a timely — if time-intensive — way to celebrate lyricist, librettist, and musical theater icon Oscar Hammerstein II, who was born on July 13, 1895 in New York City.
Mark Eden Horowitz, a Senior Music Specialist at the Library of Congress, took the plunge into the Library’s extensive collection of Hammerstein correspondence: some 25,000 letters. Of those, Horowitz transcribed “the best ones” — a mere 4,600.
And of those, the cream of the crop made the cut for The Letters of Oscar Hammerstein II — “letters that showcase not just the creative Hammerstein, but Hammerstein the businessman, the mentor, the activist, and occasionally, the corrector,” Bob Mondello writes in an article for NPR.
If a thousand-page book isn’t your idea of a good time (perhaps your copy of Infinite Jest is well-acquainted with a dustbunny or two), that article highlights a handful of interesting and often amusing letters.
One exchange centered around a falsehood in the song “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” from Carousel, particularly in these lines:
The sheep aren’t sleepin’ any more!
All the rams that chase the ewe-sheep
Are determined there’ll be new sheep
And the ewe-sheep aren’t even keepin’ score!
The problem, as pointed out to Hammerstein, is that sheep tend to mate only once a year: not in June, but in late autumn.
He responded thus:
I was delighted with the parts of your letter praising my work, and thrown into consternation by the unwelcome news about the eccentrically frigid behavior of ewes in June. I have since checked your statement and found it to be true. It looks very much as if, in the interests of scientific honesty, I shall have to abandon the verse dealing with sheep.
(He didn’t.)
Carousel is being presented this summer in rotation with five other shows by Ohio Light Opera in Freedlander Theater at The College of Wooser. A film version of the Rodgers & Hammerstein musical was released in 1956. Watch the clip featuring “June Is Bustin’ Out All Over” here.
