Director Steven Daigle stopped by to preview the season, focusing on My Fair Lady, Call Me Madam, and Die Fledermaus.
MY FAIR LADY (1956)
June 14 through August 8
Music by Frederick Loewe
Book and Lyrics Alan Jay Lerner
Its literary source, setting, and original stars were thoroughly British, its composer was born in Germany, its librettist educated in England - and yet My Fair Lady could only have been a creation of Broadway. From its 1956 opening to its close more than six years later as the longest-running musical in Broadway history, the show captured the hearts of theater-goers as no musical before or since. Phonetics professor Henry Higgins accepts a bet from his friend, Colonel Pickering, that he cannot groom a bedraggled Covent Garden flower girl, Eliza Doolittle, and pass her off to his society friends as a lady. When, after months of coaching, "the rain in Spain" falls eloquently off her tongue, the transformation is complete, as Eliza impresses Higgins' socialite friends at Ascot and at the Embassy Ball. But she rails against her mentor for turning her into something that she is not. She returns to Covent Garden, unrecognized by her friends and thoroughly disenchanted. Only now does Higgins realize his true feelings for her. But maybe too late - Freddy Eynsford-Hill has asked for her hand ... Almost every song achieved hit status: "Wouldn't It Be Loverly," "With a Little Bit of Luck," "I Could Have Danced All Night," "On the Street Where You Live," "Get Me to the Church on Time," and "I've Grown Accustomed to Her Face."
OLO Premiere
CALL ME MADAM (1950)
June 19 through August 9
Music and Lyrics by Irving Berlin
Book by Howard Lindsay and Russel Crouse
"Irving Berlin has no place in American music. HE IS AMERICAN MUSIC." This observation, by no less than Jerome Kern, was offered even years before Berlin wrote "Easter Parade," "There's No Business Like Show Business," "White Christmas," and hundreds of other songs that only further solidified his position as America's favorite songwriter. Although he contributed a few hundred songs to Broadway musical revues, he wrote the scores for only seven book musicals, including Annie Get Your Gun and, in 1950, the engaging Call Me Madam, based on episodes in the life of Washington socialite Perle Mesta. In the show, Sally Adams, the "Hostess with the Mostes' on the Ball," has been appointed ambassador to the Grand Duchy of Lichtenburg. Upon her arrival, she becomes entangled with Cosmo Constantine, head of the Conservative Radical party - too proud to accept an American loan to bail out his bankrupt country, but unable to refuse her own offer to save the 300-year-old Lichtenburg fair from cancellation. Sparks fly between Sally and Cosmo - romantic and otherwise. But her interference in the local politics triggers her recall to Washington. Berlin's remarkable score includes "It's a Lovely Day Today," "The Best Thing for You," "The Ocarina," and a Berlin counterpoint specialty: the incomparable duet "You're Just in Love" ("I Hear Singing and There's No One There") - try, if you can, to get this tune out of your head!
DIE FLEDERMAUS (1874)
June 26 through August 7
Music by Johann Strauss II
Libretto by Richard Genee and Carl Haffner
Translation by Ruth and Thomas Martin
No stage work so magically evokes the elegance and effervescence of life in Vienna as does Johann Strauss' Die Fledermaus. Its 1874 premiere ushered in the Golden Age of Viennese Operetta - within a few years, Vienna had supplanted Paris as the operetta capital of the world. Based on German and French farces, the story unfolds as a plot by Dr. Falke to avenge his earlier embarrassment on being dumped in a park, drunk and wearing a bat costume, by the well-to-do Gabriel Eisenstein following a masked ball. Falke invites Eisenstein, his wife Rosalinda, and their chambermaid Adele to a party thrown by the perpetually bored Prince Orlofsky. None of the three knows of the other invitations and, as part of Falke's scheme, each arrives at the party in disguise. Add to the mix an operatic tenor and former suitor of Rosalinda, a determined prison warden, an incompetent lawyer, and a drunken jailer ... and you have the ingredients for operetta at its best. The amusing interplay of the characters is supported by a dizzying array of Strauss tunes: a drinking song by Rosalinda's suitor Alfred, a tribute to champagne, Rosalinda's famous csardas, coloratura flights by Adele, and, of course, the expected array of Strauss waltzes, polkas, and marches.