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Ohio Light Opera: everything free and easy at Me And My Girl (June 20)

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by Stephanie Manning

Not only is it a challenge to walk out of Me and My Girl without the music stuck in your head, it’s also a challenge to pick which of the many songs you might be humming.

The charming, feel-good 1937 musical — with music by Noel Gay and book/lyrics by Douglas Furger & L. Arthur Rose — may not be much of a household name these days. But after its original success in London’s West End, a revised book by Stephen Frey and Mike Ockrent in the 1980s made the show a huge hit across the pond on Broadway. And the Ohio Light Opera’s dazzling premiere makes it easy to see why.

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Ohio Light Opera: Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld (July 13)

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by Daniel Hathaway

In 1858, a French government critic described Offenbach’s first two-act operetta, Orpheus in the Underworld, as “a profanation of holy and glorious antiquity.” But instead of reacting to its “blasphemy and lascivious goings on” with shock and horror, Parisians flocked to see the show, which ran for a then-record of 288 performances.

Ohio Light Opera shows why in the production I saw — cleverly staged by Steven Daigle, brightly conducted by Michael Borowitz, and colorfully designed by Daniel Hobbs — in its opening performance at Freedlander Theatre at the College of Wooster on July 13. Satire can scarcely ever be overdone, and the opportunity to skewer society’s sacred cows — or its gods — opens many doors wide.

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Ohio Light Opera:
Arizona Lady (July 6)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

The variety of titles that make up Ohio Light Opera’s annual summer series is its secret sauce. Go to a few shows and you’re bound to find something you’ll like, or maybe in this case a dark horse to love. Emmerich Kálmán’s Arizona Lady is an unknown in these parts — an OLO premiere this summer, which I heard on July 6 at Freedlander Theatre. It stumbles a little at times, but in the end she’s a winner.

Kálmán, who was born in Hungary, always sounds middle European to me, no matter the setting of a particular show or scene. Though the music and setting in Arizona Lady occasionally seem at odds, it’s fun to hear Hungarian-tinged folksong one minute, Viennese tradition the next, and Western cowboy songs the next.

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Ohio Light Opera: 
Camelot (June 14)

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by Daniel Hathaway

In short, there’s simply not a more congenial spot
For happily-ever-aftering than here in Camelot

On June 10, Ohio Light Opera opened its 44th season with the first of thirteen performances of Lerner & Loewe’s Camelot, brilliantly time traveling its audiences in Freedlander Theater at the College of Wooster back to a legendary and evanescent Medieval era when knights in shining armor gathered with King Arthur at a round table (where all are equal) and pledged themselves to a code of purity and chivalry.

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Ohio Light Opera: 
The Fantasticks (July 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

The Fantasticks travels lightly, but it’s traveled a great distance since Harvey Schmidt and Tom Jones adapted Les Romanesques, an 1894 play by Edmond Rostand, into a 1960 hit. The show opened in May of that year and ran off-Broadway for 42 years and over 17,000 performances.

It’s a boy-meets-girl tale simply and poignantly told along the lines of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town (or e.e. cummings’ anyone lived in a pretty how town) by a troupe of traveling actors who begin by unpacking everything they need to tell the story from a trunk.

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