The Ohio Light Opera in 3 Panels, part 1

I'm on vacation this week, partying it up in Wooster, OH at the Ohio Light Opera! As I've mentioned before, I am a lifelong fan of light opera in (almost) all its forms, and I'm having a grand time indulging in a solid week of abnormal people singing very loudly about things that normal people wouldn't sing loudly about.

For those of you unfamiliar with light opera, I am summarizing this season's performances in my now-traditional three-panel mode. 

Emmerich Kalman's Der Kleine König  tends to take itself a bit seriously for my tastes, and is sadly lacking in the glorious Kalman gypsy csardas that we all expect from him, but that shouldn't detract from the fact that the main plot point involves an opera singer attempting to assisinate the King of Portugal with a bomb hidden in a bouquet of roses. I mean... how awesome is that?

I had this entirety of The Pirates of Penzance memorized when I was about four years old, and would run around the house singing "WITH CAT-LIKE TREAD" over and over again. Surprisingly, I was not disowned.  I eventually fulfilled my childhood ambition to be a pirate by sneaking into the underpopulated men's chorus of my college's Gilbert and Sullivan society's production, where I sported the most charming penciled-on piratical beard ever seen on stage.

Seriously, I am in love with this show. It was, I believe, the first thing I ever saw in a theatre, at the tender age of three. I then watched the Covent Garden video of the gala performance with Kiri Te Kenawa over and over and over again. To this day, the only German phrases I know come directly from the libretto of Die Fledermaus.

Tune in again on Monday, when I will inflict four more three-panel operetta summaries on you! But just you wait. They'll be worth it...

Operetta Bingo

I am intensely fond of all things Shakespearean, but my first theatrical love was operetta, those fluffy, lyrical stage confections that aren't quite operas but haven't evolved into musicals. My parents took me to a local production of Johann Strauss's Die Fledermaus when I was three years old (I fell asleep in Act 3), followed shortly afterwards by a trip to the Stratford Festival to see their Pirates of Penzance. I was hooked.

Fortunately for me, the Ohio Light Opera is not too long a drive away from my home. Now in its 36th year, OLO's mission is to perform as many random operettas, light operas, comic operas and early musicals as possible. I have been going there for almost my entire life and shall be driving down again this week to get my annual operetta fix. 

To celebrate, I've put together a small bingo sheet covering some of the most common (and beloved) operetta tropes. If you are going to see an operetta anytime soon, print out a copy and take it along. Just please don't shout "BINGO" in the middle of the performance.

The sausage roll song, incidentally, is from Gilbert and Sullivan's The Grand Duke. This will probably not be the last time Gilbert and Sullivan is featured on this blog...