Operetta Geek, Part 3

Gilbert and Sullivan were satirists, or at least Gilbert’s libretti, were
satires of Victorian England. Sullivan, who was more old-fashioned, wrote
some lovely tunes like this one, “
Take a Pair of Sparkling Eyes” from
The Gondoliers. I saw a live production of
The Gondoliers a few years ago in which one of the two young, very
sexy gondoliers was a fat, bald, middle-aged lawyer. I read further in
the program. Aha! Said lawyer had financed the production. But he had a
fine tenor voice and sang this song beautifully.




Sometimes when the usual operettas get too over-the-top romantic (i.e.,
corny), you need a serving of Gilbert and Sullivan. Their shows are like
the sorbet after a heavy banquet. They cleanse your palate. For example,
here’s “
My Name Is John Wellington Wells” from
The Sorcerer and sung by Martyn Green. It’s Gilbert’s first real
patter song.
The Sorcerer is about a wedding in which groom hires the sorcerer
to sneak a love philter (potion) into the tea to make everyone fall asleep
and then fall in love with the first person they see when they wake up.
It all goes wrong of course.

While most of Noel Coward’s plays seem to embody the Roaring Twenties,
he also loved operetta and in 1929 wrote
Bitter Sweet. Here’s “
I’ll See You Again” sung by Jeanette and Nelson from their 1940 movie.
To put the song in context, Jeanette is an English socialite and Nelson’s
her singing teacher. They elope to an operetta version of Vienna, where
he’s killed in a duel with an Austrian nobleman who tries to seduce Jeanette.
At the end of the movie she sings the duet again with his voice coming
from the clouds. Coward didn’t like the movie. He said, “I was saving up
Bitter Sweet as an investment for my old age. After MGM's dreadful film
I can never revive it.” I’d love to see Coward’s operetta, but it’s apparently
been in hiding for 85 years. There’s another movie, however, this one made
by a British company in 1933 and starring Anna Neagle and Fernand Gravey.
Even though it lacks nearly all of Coward’s songs, it’s apparently a lot
closer to Coward’s play and lacks the embroidery (and extra characters)
that MGM added. One of the characters is a French chanteuse who sings “If
Love Were All.” But her accent makes the song all but incomprehensible.
I guess we get a choice—we can either get the plot (1933) or the songs
(1940). I’ll go for the songs.

Operetta moved to America at the beginning of the 20th century. One of
the first big-time American composers of operetta came from Ireland. This
is Victor Herbert, composer of
Babes in Toyland (1903),
Mlle. Modiste (1905),
The Red Mill(1906),
Naughty Marietta (1910), and
Sweethearts (1913), the latter two made into Nelson-Jeanette movies
in the late 30s. There were TV productions of
Babes in Toyland in 1954 and 1955 starring Barbara Cook, Wally Cox,
Dave Garroway (who was the host of the
Today Show—what he was doing in Toyland I’ll never quite understand),
and the Baird Marionettes. Disney got hold of
Babes in Toyland in 1961. Here’s a song from the Disney movie, “

I Can’t Do That Sum.” Surely you recognize Annette Funicello. This is a highly Disneyized
version of Herbert’s song.

My all-time favorite operetta is
The Desert Song by Sigmund Romberg, Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach,
and Frank Mandel. It’s as corny and old-fashioned as they come, but I love
it. Originally produced on Broadway in 1926, it’s based on a 1925 uprising
by Moroccan warriors called Riffs against French colonial rule, plus the
stories about Lawrence of Arabia. Like Superman and the Scarlet Pimpernel,
it uses a common motif of a manly hero (the Red Shadow) in disguise as
a mild-mannered fool (Pierre). The operetta was so popular it was made
into a movie three times (1929, 1943, 1953) and there was also a live TV
special in 1955 starring Nelson Eddy as the hero. The love interest is
a French girl named Margot. I’m being vague about the story because it
was different every time it was filmed. When I was very young, my parents
had an album of the songs on 78 rpm records (one song per record) starring
Kitty Carlisle and Wilbur Evans. I have the CD of this recording.




Last fall, I set off on a search for the pre-Code 1929 movie, which all
the Internet sources I’ve read say is closest to the Broadway production.
The stars are John Boles (a majorly lusty baritone) and Carlotta King (a
wooden soprano). Because the show’s pretty risque (one of the comic relief
characters, a society reporter, is a “nancy boy” and they tell “blue” jokes),
it became illegal to show this movie after 1934, when the infamous Production
Code kicked in. I really wanted to see the 1929 movie, so I wrote to various
websites that sell old movies. It took a long time, but I was finally referred
to a site that has what they call a vault, and one of the movies in their
vault is the 1929
Desert Song. I ordered it immediately. It’s a sort of silent movie
(with intertitle cards to set the scenes) and it’s laughably politically
incorrect, but the music is there.

The 1943 movie is also politically incorrect. It’s also “sanitized” (which
means there’s no gay comic relief) and is hardly a musical at all. Dennis
Morgan, a tenor who plays an American cabaret piano player in Morocco,
is chasing Nazis. He sings a couple of the songs, but mostly Romberg’s
songs are merely background music. The American reporter is a drunk. (Gee,
do we sense a stereotype here?) And none of the French characters are remotely
French. The further sanitized 1953 movie stars Gordon MacRae and Kathryn
Grayson. It’s marginally closer to the original, but Gordon and Kathryn
sing all the songs. And they didn’t dare use the word “Red” during the
’50s. Our hero is not a communist! So he gets a new name, El Khobar. The
1955 TV version is also shortened and highly sanitized, but the songs are
there, and they’re beautifully sung.

Some of the songs are on YouTube. Here’s “
The Riff Song,” which opens the show. It’s one of those grand male
choruses that Romberg was so famous for. And here’s the
title song from the 1929 movie. After they sing this duet, the Red
Shadow takes Margot out into the desert and the plot moves along…. Finally,
here’s Nelson again. Two of the Riff have just sung that a man should have
many women in his “garden.” The Red Shadow wants only Margot and sings
“
One Alone.” Yes, Nelson wasn’t the greatest actor there ever was,
but he sure could sing.

For next month, I’m asking a friend to write a guest blog in this space.
I could go on about operetta, but.......