by Daniel Hathaway
Oberlin Opera’s wonderful mid-March production of Candide combined several layers of brilliance.
First, the source: the anonymous 1759 novella Candide, or the Optimist. Later owned up to by the French Enlightenment philosopher François-Marie Arouet — better known by his nom de plume, Voltaire — it was a deliciously wicked send-up of the absurd teachings of optimist philosophers like Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, who taught that everything was for the best “in this best of all possible worlds.”
Then in 1956 came the first staged version of Candide as a comic opera with a witty libretto by Lillian Hellman and a high-spirited score by Leonard Bernstein — originally conceived by Hellman as a play, but Bernstein’s intentions of making it an operetta won out. [Read more…]
You know the song from Rent that asks how to measure a year of life? Well, steering clear of doing the math for “525,600 minutes” times 26, how do you measure a career lasting over a quarter-century?
Oberlin Opera Theater’s fall double bill of Jacques Offenbach’s farce Le mariage aux lanternes and Rossini’s operetta L’occasione fa il ladro gave director Jonathon Field and two fine student casts a crack at producing both a puff piece and a classical bel canto title on the same program. They proved fully capable of meeting all challenges, bringing professional-level acting and singing to the Hall Auditorium stage. I saw the performance on November 12.
If you’re looking for some extra laughter in your life, Oberlin Opera Theater has the perfect ticket when they present the Oberlin premieres of a pair of one-act comedies. 
It’s been said that six is the magic number of guests to invite to a dinner party. Fewer than that reduces the likelihood of witty repartée, and more than that risks having the party break up into multiple conversations. That principle also applies to casts of comic operas that depend on scintillating conversations and wild misperceptions to fuel the plot.
Domenico Cimarosa’s 
In Book XIII of Ovid’s epic poem 
