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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’s The Arcadians: all upbeat, all the time (July 18)

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by Peter Feher

The Ohio Light Opera is traveling to a world terrifically out of time in The Arcadians, the company’s sixth and final production of the summer.

No, not Arcadia, the mythical realm where shepherds and nymphs always tell the truth and, as a result, never grow old. That vision of utopia lasts for only one act of Lionel Monckton, Howard Talbot, and Arthur Wimperis’ 1909 musical comedy. For the remainder of the show, we’re whisked to what would have been familiar territory for the three songwriters but what, in 2024, might seem like an even more fantastical setting: Edwardian England.

The delightful sense of dislocation owes a little to OLO’s staging and a lot to the inevitable reality that The Arcadians has aged. Like much turn-of-the-20th-century musical theater, the story here — by librettists Mark Ambient and Alexander M. Thompson — comes second to the songs. [Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera:
H.M.S. Pinafore, or 
The Lass That Loved a Sailor (June 29)

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by Daniel Hathaway

It’s been a good thing for the creative team of W.S. Gilbert and Arthur Seymour Sullivan that Victorian England was rife with unqualified public officials, rigid class distinctions, and social inequality. What would the plot of H.M.S. Pinafore, one of their most popular Savoy Operas, have been like without the opportunity to lampoon such functionaries as W. H. Smith, a politician with no nautical experience, by portraying him as Sir Joseph Porter, the First Lord of the Admiralty? His advice:

[Read more…]

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.

[Read more…]

Ohio Light Opera: Hello, Dolly! (June 23)

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by Daniel Hathaway

On June 23, Ohio Light Opera rang up the curtain on the second production of its 43rd season in Freedlander Theatre at The College of Wooster. Following on the heels of Rodgers & Hammerstein’s Cinderella, the company’s first-ever staging of Hello, Dolly! continued the inclusion of Broadway in OLO’s repertoire.

The story line has its origin in an 1855 play and an 1842 farce that Thornton Wilder mined for his 1938 play The Merchant of Yonkers. When that turned out to be a flop, in 1954 Wilder made the crucial decision to re-center the show around the character of the legendary marriage broker Dolly Gallagher Levi and renamed it The Matchmaker. [Read more…]

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