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…]