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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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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: 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…]

Ohio Light Opera: George & Ira Gershwin’s Tip-Toes (June 26)

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by Kevin McLaughlin

On a sunny Thursday afternoon in Wooster on June 26, Ohio Light Opera’s revival of the Gershwin brothers’ Tip-Toes (1925) made its premiere during a carefree two hours at the College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre.

Director Jacob Allen embraced the show’s silliness — mistaken identities, romantic mix-ups, and a heroine with amnesia — while keeping the action kinetic and the comedy light on its feetThe production succeeds due to excellent staging and choreography, but also thanks to sharp acting, nimble dancing, heartfelt singing, and general razzle-dazzle. Proof that even the more neglected musicals of the Jazz Age can still charm a modern audience. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: Lerner & Loewe’s Brigadoon (June 19)

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by Daniel Hathaway

Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s 1947 Brigadoon owes much of its popularity to the familiarity of its music — and people who have never seen the show can find themselves carrying tunes like “The Heather on the Hill,” “Come to Me, Bend to me, ”and “Almost Like Being in Love” around in their ears, not knowing where they came from.

Equally as compelling are its Scottish Highland dances, which are numerous,  authentic, and as one commentator noted in a review of Brigadoon’s debut, so well-integrated into the plot that ‘it is impossible to say where the music and dancing leave off and the story begins.’

Engagingly directed by Jacob Allen, with lively choreography by Spencer Reese, and Wilson Southerland leading the excellent OLO Orchestra, Ohio Light Opera’s alluring production of Brigadoon opened on June 19 in Freedlander Theater at the College of Wooster. [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: a group chat about Brigadoon

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by Daniel Hathaway & Mike Telin

Immediately following Ohio Light Opera’s wonderful opening performance of Alan J. Lerner and Frederick Loewe’s Brigadoon on June 19, we had the opportunity to sit down at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre with director Jacob Allen, conductor Wilson Southerland, choreographer and cast member Spencer Reese, and cast members Maggie Langhorne and Jack Murphy to talk about the production.

CC: Great job, everyone! Jacob, please share your thoughts about the show.  [Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera embraces the nuances of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Carousel (June 14)

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by Stephanie Manning

If you’ve never seen Rodgers and Hammerstein’s Carousel, don’t let the title fool you. Although the carousel in question is literal, it’s also a metaphor — for cycles of unhealthy relationships, social ostracization, and abuse.

Eighty years on from its Broadway debut, Carousel finds itself in a tricky position in the musical theater canon. Featuring some of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s most beautiful songs, the work is so beloved that TIME Magazine named it the best musical of the 20th century. But it’s also faced criticism for its portrayal of domestic violence.

Deftly directed by Steven Daigle and unafraid to face some thorny topics head on, Ohio Light Opera’s Carousel made for a compelling start to the company’s 46th season at The College of Wooster’s Freedlander Theatre on June 14. [Read more…]

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