Operette

Book music and lyrics by Noel Coward.

Original London cast: Fritzi Massary, Peggy Wood, Hugh French, Ross Landon,
John Gatrell, Kenneth Carten md Benjamin Frankel

Countess Mitzi; Dearest Love; Gipsy Melody; The Stately Homes Of England; Where Are The Songs We Sung?; Operette

 

Understandably, Coward considered this the least favourite of his musical works. Written to display the charms of the 55-year old European star Fritzi Massary, it had a plot so convoluted that even Coward, watching it from a box, had to read a programme to discover what was going on. Massary brought a continental playfulness to the role of Liesl Haren, a Viennese star of an operetta called 'The Model Maid', enabling Coward to use the 'show-within-a-show' formula - one he exploited again in his final score for The Girl Who Came To Supper and in Ace of Clubs. Audiences did not fully appreciate Miss Massary's gallant but strangled English when the show opened at His Majesty's Theatre in March 1938, although it lasted for 133 performances.

 

The recordings made by the cast do not excite, although there is a glow when Massary relates the adventures of 'Countess Mitzi' (a number reworked for Jose Ferrer in The Girl Who Came To Supper) and gives a skittish interpretation of the title song. Apparently, however, Miss Massary did not much care for her numbers.

 

Peggy Wood gets the conventional ballads, but both 'Where Are The Songs We Sung?' and 'Dearest Love' have an autumnal gloom about them, and do not encourage repetitive listening. Probably the most famous item is the often extrapolated 'The Stately Homes Of England' sung by four toffs, nothing to do with the plot of course, but there to give verse after verse of Coward's acidic comment on upper class piles. It has always seemed to me to be over-long and tedious.

RETURN TO RECORD CABINET