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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: How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying (June 15)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

How to explain the pleasure of Ohio Light Opera’s production of How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying, which opened on June 15 at Freedlander Theatre? With music and lyrics by Frank Loesser, it’s a good-natured romp from the Mad Men milieu of the early 1960s that tries not to recall the bad old days too clearly, or to at least do it in jest. With an excellent cast, sets, and costumes, it’s hard not to have a good time with this production directed by Jacob Allen. I did, even if some of the old-fashioned attitudes rankled a little.

You might suspect that How to Succeed, which won the 1962 Pulitzer Prize for drama, had been ahead of its time, shining a light as it did on the bad behavior of get-ahead businessmen. Nah… Some of the more obvious sexist jokes and lyrics of the original may have been toned down for this production, but a lot of the caddishness remains, even if obviously intended as a send-up.

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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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