musical review: The Chocolate Soldier
Jun. 24th, 2005 07:35 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
calimacAt least four of my local friends didn't venture up to the City for the Serenity preview, because that's the number of them I saw at last night's performance of The Chocolate Soldier by the Lyric Theatre of San Jose. Even though they came in two couples, that's still a record-breaking number of personal encounters at the theatre for me, especially for an underpopulated Thursday night show. But Viennese operetta has more fans than might be expected.
Count me less as a fan than as curious. I am a fan of Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man, which I've seen several times, and on which Der tapfere Soldat (the original German title, which means The Valiant Soldier and is meant ironically) was based. It premiered in Vienna in 1908 with music by Oscar Straus, the only famous one-final-S musical Straus, not to be confused with all the two-S Strausses.
Straus's music is all that remained in this performance. The original adaptation resembled Shaw's play about as much as The Boys of Syracuse resembles Comedy of Errors, and the plot didn't hang together very well. The book was thoroughly rewritten by this production's director to track Shaw's play a lot more closely, and my mother - who accompanied me - informs me that the lyrics were a completely different translation than the one she was familiar with from childhood. Not a very good translation either, with doggerel verse that would make W.S. Gilbert or Lorenz Hart scream in agony and even Oscar Hammerstein wince. The phrase "chocolate soldier" doesn't even appear in this text; instead Raina refers to Bluntschli nauseatingly as "my chocolate truffle man." (This name refers to his fondness for eating chocolate, and does not mean that he stands around in New York City on a hot summer day and melts. In Shaw, the phrase is "chocolate cream soldier.")
Of the three acts, the second in particular dragged horribly. I know there aren't supposed to be any second acts in American lives, but nobody said whether second acts should be omitted from Viennese operettas. A couple of the principals were veterans of the group's fine April production of The Mikado, and most of the other singers were good-voiced, so it wasn't the cast that was the problem. I think it was the stodgy direction, which had the actors standing around awkwardly addressing personal confidences to the audience instead of each other, and the material. Perhaps the problem with the second act was that it had the longest stretches of spoken dialogue, which reproduced Shaw's plot without a touch of his wit, and which the cast, who are after all musical-comedy singers and not trained dramatic actors, really weren't equipped to handle.
Nor was Oscar Straus an Arthur Sullivan. All the songs sounded the same, and what they all sounded like was Sullivan's most one-size-fits-all number, "The Magnet and the Churn". I'll give Straus credit for a very imaginative and attractive use of passing notes around among multiple singers, but overall this was not a very inspired score, or a very inspired production.
Count me less as a fan than as curious. I am a fan of Bernard Shaw's play Arms and the Man, which I've seen several times, and on which Der tapfere Soldat (the original German title, which means The Valiant Soldier and is meant ironically) was based. It premiered in Vienna in 1908 with music by Oscar Straus, the only famous one-final-S musical Straus, not to be confused with all the two-S Strausses.
Straus's music is all that remained in this performance. The original adaptation resembled Shaw's play about as much as The Boys of Syracuse resembles Comedy of Errors, and the plot didn't hang together very well. The book was thoroughly rewritten by this production's director to track Shaw's play a lot more closely, and my mother - who accompanied me - informs me that the lyrics were a completely different translation than the one she was familiar with from childhood. Not a very good translation either, with doggerel verse that would make W.S. Gilbert or Lorenz Hart scream in agony and even Oscar Hammerstein wince. The phrase "chocolate soldier" doesn't even appear in this text; instead Raina refers to Bluntschli nauseatingly as "my chocolate truffle man." (This name refers to his fondness for eating chocolate, and does not mean that he stands around in New York City on a hot summer day and melts. In Shaw, the phrase is "chocolate cream soldier.")
Of the three acts, the second in particular dragged horribly. I know there aren't supposed to be any second acts in American lives, but nobody said whether second acts should be omitted from Viennese operettas. A couple of the principals were veterans of the group's fine April production of The Mikado, and most of the other singers were good-voiced, so it wasn't the cast that was the problem. I think it was the stodgy direction, which had the actors standing around awkwardly addressing personal confidences to the audience instead of each other, and the material. Perhaps the problem with the second act was that it had the longest stretches of spoken dialogue, which reproduced Shaw's plot without a touch of his wit, and which the cast, who are after all musical-comedy singers and not trained dramatic actors, really weren't equipped to handle.
Nor was Oscar Straus an Arthur Sullivan. All the songs sounded the same, and what they all sounded like was Sullivan's most one-size-fits-all number, "The Magnet and the Churn". I'll give Straus credit for a very imaginative and attractive use of passing notes around among multiple singers, but overall this was not a very inspired score, or a very inspired production.
