by Nicholas Jones
On a beautiful summer day last week, we drove to Wooster to spend the afternoon in Shangri-La – or, more specifically, to watch Ohio Light Opera’s opening performance of Johann Strauss, Jr.’s comic masterpiece, Die Fledermaus (“The Bat”).
In this blissful concatenation of dance and melody, a marital comedy is played out in a fantasy world of masquerade. A chambermaid becomes an actress for the evening; a transvestite Russian prince staves off boredom by throwing a lavish ball; a prison is transformed into a party; a squabbling bourgeois couple seems to learn how to fall in love again. [Read more…]