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Ohio Light Opera: Franz Lehár’s The Merry Widow (July 9)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Despite its humble origin as a hasty replacement for a failed Viennese lyrical theater project, Franz Lehar’s 1905 lyrical theater piece The Merry Widow quickly rose to prominence, racking up its 400th performance as early as April 4, 1907 while igniting a brisk demand for merch in the form of Merry Widow corsets, hats, and cigars.

With its popular story line featuring aristocrats keeping up appearances while staring down financial ruin, international intrigues involving fictitious principalities, mismatched romances needing to be sorted out, and brief excursions into the demimonde of society’s less respectable institutions, TMW wasted few opportunities to become the quintessential Viennese operetta. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera presents splendid Yeomen of the Guard (July 16)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Ohio Light Opera opened its tenth production of The Yeomen of the Guard, on Thursday afternoon, July 16, at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. Director Steven Daigle’s staging kept the action buoyant and funny without pretending that every character emerges happily from the plot.

Arthur Sullivan sets it all to one of his richest scores: grand, intimate, and often joyous. Renée Surprenant Fitzgerald’s setting placed the action at the imposing doorstep of the Tower of London, while Charlene Gross’s costumes, in yellows, reds, and pinks, were bright and reassuringly ridiculous — not just British, but Gilbert & Sullivanian.

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Something familiar, something peculiar: Ohio Light Opera’s The Boys from Syracuse (June 25)

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by Peter Feher

A traveler from ancient Greece could easily get mixed up looking at a map of modern Ohio and set out for Athens, Macedonia, or East Sparta, only to be in for a shock upon arrival. Still, it would take a misunderstanding of exceedingly farcical proportions to embark for the city of Ephesus yet somehow end up at the College of Wooster.

But this is just the sort of topsy-turvy trajectory that has landed The Boys From Syracuse in the Ohio Light Opera’s current season. (To be clear: Our title characters hail from the Mediterranean, not Upstate New York.)

With a keen appreciation for comic absurdity, the company in residence each summer at Freedlander Theatre is mounting its first-ever staging of Richard Rodgers and Lorenz Hart’s bygone 1938 Broadway hit. OLO’s production, which runs in repertory through July 30, is at once foreign and familiar — amusingly so.
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Ohio Light Opera’s Damn Yankees has all kinds of heart (June 18)

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by Stephanie Manning

Any hardcore Cleveland Guardians fan might say they’d do anything to see their team win. But would they strike a deal with the devil for it?

The character of Joe Boyd makes just that kind of Faustian bargain for his beloved baseball team in Damn Yankees, the second of six shows to open at Ohio Light Opera this season. The 1955 musical, with music and lyrics by Richard Adler and Jerry Ross and a book by George Abbott and Douglass Wallop, began its run in the College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theater on June 18.

A premiere for the company, this golden age musical has plenty of heart, even if its second half doesn’t quite hit a home run. But with a strong cast and direction by Steven Daigle, it’s a production worth checking out, filled with colorful sets and infectious energy from the performers.

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Ohio Light Opera: My Fair Lady (June 17)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Ohio Light Opera’s production of Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady seems tailor-made for the company’s knack for giving familiar repertory fresh legs.

Half Edwardian social experiment, half hit parade, Jacob Allen’s staging treats its manners and melodies as pleasures rather than relics, while keeping the show’s questions about social class, gender stereotypes, and women’s independence unresolved. The show runs in rep through August 2 at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. I saw the performance on June 17.

The plot, based on George Bernard Shaw’s Pygmalion, remains familiar. Phonetics professor Henry Higgins wagers with a colleague that he can take Eliza Doolittle, a Covent Garden flower seller whose accent he finds intolerable and whose intelligence he badly underestimates, and pass her off as a duchess. Through drills, bullying, coaxing, and one miraculous breakthrough involving ‘The Rain in Spain,’ he succeeds. The trouble is that Eliza turns out not to be clay in Higgins’s hands, but a person with an acute self-awareness.

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Last lap at Ohio Light Opera: a few questions for Steven A. Daigle

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by Daniel Hathaway

2026 will mark the end of an era for Ohio Light Opera at the College of Wooster. Artistic director Steven A. Daigle will retire at the end of this summer’s season, which makes this a good opportunity for an exit interview. What has his job entailed for the past quarter century, and how does he see OLO moving into the future?

I reached Steve by telephone on Memorial Day in a moment of calm before the cast, orchestra and crew descended upon the Wayne County campus to set things in motion for this season’s six shows. I began by asking how he and his colleagues go about choosing the titles for a season.

Steven Daigle: Well, there is a formula that we’ve been using since I’ve been artistic director. ’Doc,’ James Stewart, used one before, but since then we’ve expanded the repertory to include musical theater. With our mission now, we pick three musicals, and we try to have one of them be an early musical — this summer, it’s The Boys from Syracuse.

We try to choose stylistically different titles for the other two, and I think we’ve achieved that in My Fair Lady and Damn Yankees. They’re golden age musicals from the 1950s and 1960s, but in a way they couldn’t be more different from each other. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera opens 47th season with My Fair Lady, directed by Jacob Allen

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by Mike Telin

When Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s My Fair Lady debuted on Broadway in 1956, it was an instant success — winning six Tony Awards, including Best Musical.

Indeed, the story about Eliza Doolittle, a Cockney flower girl who is magically transformed into a lady by the phonetics professor Henry Higgins, is filled with songs that will keep you humming for days.

On Saturday, June 13 at 2:00 pm in the College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre, Ohio Light Opera will open their 47th season with the iconic musical. Jacob Allen directs and Michael Borowitz conducts the OLO Orchestra. My Fair Lady runs in rep through August 2. Tickets are available online. View a season calendar here.

I caught up with Jacob Allen by phone and began our conversation by asking him about his history with the musical.

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Ohio Light Opera: The Cousin from Batavia (July 23)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Last seen in Wooster in 2002, The Cousin from Batavia (1921) — with its tangle of mistaken identities, impromptu romance, and Southeast Asian impostures — may be less familiar to English-speaking audiences than other Golden Age operettas. But Ohio Light Opera’s sweet-tempered, farcical revival at Freedlander Theatre on July 23 proved charming enough to win over even the staunchest devotees of the present-day and plausible. The late operetta scholar Richard Traubner rendered the text into vivid English.

Composed by Eduard Künneke with a witty libretto by Hermann Haller and “Rideamus” — “Let us laugh,” the Latin pseudonym of German-Jewish satirist and lawyer Fritz Oliven — Batavia blends the lyricism of Viennese operetta with the slapstick of farce. Wilson Southerland’s crisp conducting and the orchestra’s fine playing brought out all the color and buoyancy in Künneke’s sparkling score. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet (July 17)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

Noël Coward’s Bitter Sweet was a grand hit in 1929, but its large cast, relatively complex plot, and throwback operetta format have kept it out of the regular repertoire in recent years.

Thank goodness for Ohio Light Opera’s polished new staging, seen on July 17 at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre. This elegant — and yes, bittersweet — tale of love, loss, and the passage of time was elevated by superb singing, splendid orchestral playing under Michael Borowitz’s baton, and all the wit, warmth, and visual splendor one hopes to find at the theater.

Structured as a memory play, Bitter Sweet is a deeply personal work. According to biographers, the love story — particularly as expressed through the character of Carl Linden — puts Coward’s romantic ideals on full display.

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Ohio Light Opera: Patience, or Bunthorne’s Bride (July 2)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Of all the sacred Victorian oxen William Shenk Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan set out to gore in their fourteen Savoy Operas, their satire of the Aesthetic Movement and its medieval values is one of their cleverest.

Patience (1890) lampoons the literary excesses of the aesthetes and their followers with similar affectations of its own, and the G&S veterans of Ohio Light Opera miss few opportunities to demonstrate their individual virtuosity.

I saw the opening performance, a matinee, at Freedlander Theater at The College of Wooster on July 2. The production was expertly directed by veteran company member Julie Wright Costa, and choreographed by Spencer Reese, with Wilson Southerland conducting the fine-sounding OLO Orchestra. [Read more…]

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