At Ohio Light Opera, Old Shows Become New Again

In 1979, the Ohio Light Opera presented its first season at the College of Wooster, not too far from Cleveland. The early seasons were focused on the classic Savoy Operas of Gilbert and Sullivan, but the mandate kept expanding. From those iconic works to other operettas, British and European as well as American, and from there to early American musical works — Jerome Kern’s Princess Theater shows, for instance — and eventually more mainstream Broadway.For most of this century, OLO’s seasons have been a potpourri of all of the above: operetta and more modern musical theater. The productions are fully professional regional shows, all with full sets and costumes — not concert-style performances— and, most importantly, with full orchestras.This year, the “playlist” ranged from G & S (“The Yeomen of the Guard”) to operettas from both Austria (“The Merry Widow”) and America (“The Red Mill”), and three more familiar Broadway shows, “The Boys from Syracuse,” “Damn Yankees,” and “My Fair Lady.” The season usually runs from mid-June to early August, but for out-of-towners, the trick is to come during the last week of July, when it’s possible to see all six shows over three daily doubleheader days.And it’s well worth the trip. This year, the biggest surprise was Victor Herbert’s “The Red Mill,” and the production that held the fewest surprises—but was extremely enjoyable nonetheless—was “My Fair Lady.” The 1906 work was a minor revelation: we think of operetta as being rigid, formal, and old-fashioned, compared to more mature Broadway, but just as much of it is deliberately zany. “The Red Mill” takes place in the old world (Holland, specifically) and yes, there’s a very traditional, even melodramatic plot in which the ingénue is in love with a dashing captain and so resists the dictatorial demands of her father, the village Burgomaster, that she marry the wealthy governor instead. But this is played essentially as self-parody of an older tradition, especially since the antics of a wacky comedy team are superimposed on top of it. In 1906, it was Fred Stone and David C. Montgomery, best known to history as the stars of the blockbuster 1903 “The Wizard of Oz.” in Ohio, it’s Jack Murphy and Jeremiah Angel. Spencer Reese’s direction and OLO artistic director Stephen Daigle’s reconstruction made it clear why “The Red Mill” is “modern” enough to have been successfully revived in 1945; the juxtaposition between the old-school love story — and Herbert’s soaring love songs—and the anarchic humor anticipates later Broadway vehicles for, say, the Marx Brothers, like “The Cocoanuts” and “Animal Crackers,” as well as the less well-remembered Wheeler & Woolsey.‘My Fair Lady’ at Ohio Light Opera.“My Fair Lady” illustrates the value of a well-done, more traditional production. These days, for a classic show to be revived on Broadway it generally has to be completely overhauled (like the current “The Phantom of the Opera,” aka “Masquerade”) or at least bring in a marquee name. “My Fair Lady” was simply the show as Alan Jay Lerner (who, ’tis said, was the original choice to write the aforementioned “Phantom”) and Frederick Loewe conceived it, with a cast highlighted by the excellent Thomas Valenti as Henry Higgins and Niko Theriault as Alfred Doolittle.The OLO “Damn Yankees” was a potent alternative to the planned forthcoming Broadway revival, an extension of the Arena Stage production from last year. Where the Arena production, billed as a “revisical,” mostly unobtrusively updates the story and some of the attitudes to the 21st century, the Ohio version was firmly set in 1955 — when New York still boasted three major league ball clubs — a point which they hammered home perhaps a little unsubtly by placing Eisenhower-era advertising signs and slogans everywhere. The success of any incarnation of “Yankees” is largely due to the charisma of what might be called the story’s anti-villain, the Satanic Mr. Applegate, and incoming OLO Artistic Director Jacob Allen made the most of the role. You remember “Yankees” mainly for Applegate’s showstopping comedy numbers and the big rah-rah baseball dance routines, but here, the actors playing both Joes, old (Mark Hosseini) and young (Connor Burns), reminded us that the show also has some of Broadway’s most compelling love songs, i.e., “Goodbye Old Girl” and “A Man Doesn’t Know.” In “The Yeomen of the Guard,” Gilbert and Sullivan were trying to edge more in the direction of grand opera rather than their more customary madcap style; this is a rare G&S show that doesn’t end with a happy ending for everyone. Ted Christopher makes an outstanding Jack Point, who gets the score’s single strongest piece, the unforgettable “I Have a Song to Sing, O!.” This is the rare G&S aria that has taken on a life of its own beyond the work itself; for instance Peter, Paul and Mary treated it like a traditional English folk song. Point is one of the most carefully nuanced characters in the entire musical theater or opera repertory, at times admirable, at times pitiable, at other times reprehensible, and ultimately tragic. Mr. Christopher caught every side of him.As with “I Have a Song to Sing, O!,” there are few things in this world that I treasure more than hearing a great voice, in this case a soprano, sing “Vilja Song” (aka “Villia”) the Act II opener of “The Merry Widow,” and Melanie Athans really delivered. The rest of the show is a very high-level sitcom decked out with gorgeous costumes and a scoreful of some of the most entrancing waltzes ever composed. The titular waltz is one you all know from the many films and TV adaptations of this Austrian work that took New York by storm in 1907. (Fun fact: “Maxim’s,” from Act I, was one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s favorite songs.)In many ways, “The Boys from Syracuse” was the boldest production yet. Considering that this is the most freewheeling and slapstick-y of the mature Richard Rodgers & Lorenz Hart shows, based on what is probably the least serious of all Shakespeare plays (“The Comedy of Errors,” itself based on an ancient Roman source), Mr. Allen, here serving as director, decided to Fred Flintstone it up, with cartoonish sight gags that deliberately courted anachronism, e.g., outfitting the police of ancient Ephesus with headwear that splits the difference between Roman legionnaire galea and British bobby custodian helmet. The mood is farcical and the humor is outrageous, and the score is one of Rodgers & Hart’s most marvelous.The overall mix of each OLO season is well-nigh irresistible, especially for those of us who wait all year for the chance to see a proper production of any kind of operetta. Early in Act I of “Damn Yankees,” the team manager and three ballplayers sing this line after a particularly depressing loss, but it’s also an appropriate motto to follow a triumphant season: “Wait till next year, and hope.”

At Ohio Light Opera, Old Shows Become New Again

At Ohio Light Opera, Old Shows Become New Again

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