“Operetta, once the most popular European form of musical theater, has declined in its native lands, while in the United States it never caught on strongly. Today Johann Strauss’s ‘Fledermaus’ and Franz Lehar’s ‘Merry Widow’ are the only two operettas Americans are likely to have encountered, apart from the light operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.” A festival called Mostly Operetta, presented this month in New York by the Austrian Cultural Forum, updates the aging art form and puts it in an intimate space.
Author: Laura Collins Hughes
Hamlet And Ophelia Were Exceptions To The Rule
Danes score higher than other Westerners on life satisfaction, and scientists think they know why. “In a paper appearing in the Dec. 23 issue of the medical journal BMJ, researchers review six likely and unlikely explanations, and conclude that the country’s secret is a culture of low expectations. … Danes continually report lower expectations for the year to come, compared with most other nations. And ‘year after year, they are pleasantly surprised to find that not everything is getting more rotten in the state of Denmark,’ the paper concludes.”
Ballets Russes Dancer Ruthanna Boris, 88
“Ruthanna Boris, a versatile dancer and choreographer who was the first American ballerina to be a star of one of the prestigious Ballets Russes troupes of the ’40s, died Friday at her home in El Cerrito, Calif.”
At Amazon, ‘Prices Go Up, Prices Go Down’
“Imagine this: You go to a bookstore, browse, choose a couple of volumes. But you don’t want to carry the books around. So you ask the clerk to hold the tomes until Saturday, when you’ll come back to buy them. When you return, the bookseller hands you the items but advises you that he’s raised the prices. ‘I knew you were hot to buy them,’ the clerk says, ‘so I figured I could make a few extra bucks.’ That’s what it feels like online bookseller Amazon.com Inc. has been doing to me.”
In Praise Of The Word ‘Culture’
“We all carry culture within us; whether we wish to or not, it is as embedded in our minds as DNA is in our cell structure. Culture cannot be reduced to elemental terms, such as a painting on a wall or notes resounding in hall, but is a continuing series of experiences that affect every mind in a different way. In the end, culture is worth celebrating as a word, and as a condition not to be endured but used to educate and enliven.”
Wartime Pervades Pop-Music Consciousness
“Beyond typical wartime attitudes of belligerence, protest and yearning for peace, in 2006 pop moved toward something different: a mood somewhere between resignation and a siege mentality. Songs that touched on the war in 2006 were suffused with the mournful and resentful knowledge that — as Neil Young titled the album he made and rush-released in the spring — we are ‘Living With War,’ and will be for some time. Awareness of the war throbs like a chronic headache behind more pleasant distractions.”
Regan Vs. Rupert: Old-Style Hollywood Spectacle?
“When it comes to spectacle, Hollywood enjoys nothing better than a nasty legal battle between two determined and egotistical adversaries: Bette Davis meets Joan Crawford, in a courtroom.” The participants in past high-profile lawsuits have “cringed to hear their private comments and inner thoughts offered up for public consumption. And so may it go if the headline-making book publisher Judith Regan proceeds with a lawsuit her lawyers have threatened against the News Corporation, which owns HarperCollins, the publishing house that fired her in December after the O. J. Simpson book and television project imploded.”
London’s Theatre Museum Closing Sunday
“The Theater Museum in London, Britain’s national museum of the performing arts, is scheduled to close to the public on Sunday after almost 20 years at its Russell Street location in Covent Garden. The museum, which is a branch of the Victoria and Albert and houses one of the world’s largest collections of documents and artifacts related to theater, dance, opera and other performances, has been unable to secure financing for redevelopment.”
A Wendy Chronicle
In an end-of-year reminiscence, Frank Rich remembers his longtime friend, playwright Wendy Wasserstein, who died last January. “The Wendy Wasserstein who was always there for everybody (including me) at every crisis and celebration, the Wendy with that uproarious (yet musical) laugh and funny (yet never bitchy) dialogue for every fraught situation, the Wendy the whole world knew and adored was also an intensely private person who left many mysteries behind.”
The Philadelphia Orchestra, With Filler
“When is the Philadelphia Orchestra not the Philadelphia Orchestra? It’s no riddle, but a question of artistic integrity tested by the orchestra’s Sunday night New Year’s Eve concert in which a quarter or more of the musicians on stage at Verizon Hall were substitutes. It might not be worth noting had the members of the orchestra been less righteous about such matters in the past.”