More Muscle Than Fluff

Operetta is the Rodney Dangerfield of the American performing arts, forever in search of respect.

A comic-romantic form in which the principals speak and dance as well as sing, it’s long been caught between two worlds: too quaint and operatic for Broadway and not profound enough for grand opera houses.

Americans have, in fact, spent decades thinking of operetta as mere fluff. But that, say those who know, is a bum rap.

Operetta’s lightness of tone shouldn’t be confused with a lack of musical substance. “Certainly it takes an equally great effort on our part as a performance of what would be perceived to be a major standard opera, there’s no question,” says Santa Fe Opera founder and general director John Crosby, in Los Angeles to conduct the L.A. Opera staging of Emmerich Kalman’s operetta “Countess Maritza,” which opens Saturday.

“You can’t come in and just toss it off. You have to prepare. And then you have to make the audience feel that it just happens, like that.”

What makes the form demanding is not only its music but also its intricate interdisciplinary format. “Operetta is hard because it combines everything,” says director Linda Brovsky, who’s staging the Kalman work. “You’ve got the dialogue, and that’s one whole set of skills and tempi, and getting people to interrelate. Then you’ve got the music and the dancing.

“Everything overlaps and intertwines,” she says. “You’re in a constant collaboration with the choreographer and the conductor and the cast. It’s not a nightmare; it’s a challenge, one of the bigger challenges for both directors and conductors.”

A genre with roots in mid-19th century opera-comique, operetta has three principal schools: Viennese, French and English. The Spanish zarzuela is also considered by some to be a form of operetta.

Although it had its heyday in Europe at the beginning of the century, it became popular on film in America during the 1930s and briefly made it to Broadway in the 1940s.

However, with the rise of the American musical, operetta was squeezed out of Hollywood and Broadway.

Yet the world of grand opera wasn’t ready to give it a home; none of the major opera houses had yet presented an operetta as part of the regular season. That began to change only in the postwar period.

“Rudolph Bing [general manager of the Metropolitan Opera, 1950-72] broke the ice on that question with his production of ‘Die Fledermaus,’ ” says Crosby. “The success of the ‘Fledermaus’ at the Met opened the door.”

Since the ‘50s, however, the door has opened only slightly.

“There was a whole trend in the ‘60s and ‘70s where the only people who really were doing operetta were the community theater groups, and they didn’t have the forces to give it its due,” says Brovsky. “So then we started looking down on it as that regional piece of fluff.”

Today, there are companies throughout the U.S. that specialize in operetta, although they are typically without the resources of their counterparts in Europe or of grand opera here. Beyond that, many of America’s major opera companies also present the occasional operetta--typically Johann Strauss II’s “Die Fledermaus” or Franz Lehar’s “The Merry Widow.”

And slowly grand opera is starting to pay more attention, with productions of the standard operettas programmed to add variety to seasons and with productions that reclaim worthy works among the many neglected examples of the genre.

New York City Opera, for example, presents a steady diet not only of operettas but also of musicals. Houston Grand Opera has also presented more than a dozen operettas, including both familiar and seldom seen works. And Santa Fe, particularly known for its Richard Strauss productions, has showcased not only “Die Fledermaus” and “The Merry Widow” but also Offenbach’s “Orpheus in the Underworld” and Gilbert and Sullivan’s “The Gondoliers,” among others.

In 1995 Santa Fe took the risk of staging the unfamiliar “Countess Maritza” and met with success. It is that production, with a few changes, that is being presented in L.A.

In fact, the 1995 “Countess Maritza” wasn’t the first time the company has had particular success with introducing a relatively unknown operetta into the contemporary American repertory.

“Our commitment is to avoid neglecting the unusual and contemporary,” says Crosby. “One operetta--’Grand Duchess of Gerolstein’ by Offenbach--was very much the unusual.

“It was about 1973 when we gave it, and before you could say Jack Robinson, it was given in the San Francisco Opera, the Baltimore Opera, the Canadian Opera in Toronto, Miami Opera and Houston Opera. We revived it three times in rapid succession, which is for us rather unusual rapidity of revival.”

Here in the Greater L.A. area, there are a number of groups that present operetta, including Orange County Light Opera and Opera a la Carte, which presents its Gilbert and Sullivan staple, “The Pirates of Penzance” at Cal State L.A.’s Luckman Fine Arts Complex today.

Prior to “Countess Maritza,” L.A. Opera presented “Orpheus in the Underworld,” “The Mikado,” the musical “Oklahoma!” and the zarzuela “El Gato Montes.”

As the range of works indicates, the company doesn’t define its terrain narrowly. “I have never had any problem with opera companies doing operetta as well as opera,” says General Director Peter Hemmings. “I think the names can be misleading. Opera has always embraced all styles and periods.

“Once Disney Hall is finished, maybe we will be strong enough to present more operas [of all kinds], including, obviously, pieces like “The Merry Widow,” “Die Fledermaus” and the Gilbert and Sullivan works.”

Opera Pacific, which completes a run of the Australian Opera’s staging of Sir Arthur Sullivan’s “The Mikado” today, has shown an increased propensity for these works in the 1990s. The company, which offered several musicals and operettas during the 1980s, presented Kalman’s”The Gypsy Princess” (the first full American production) in 1992, “The Merry Widow” in 1994 and “Die Fledermaus” in 1996.

The increased emphasis on operettas was in part a response to the greater prevelance of touring musicals. “In the 1980s, when I first founded the company, I was concentrating more on American musicals,” says David DiChiera, artistic director of Opera Pacific and general director of Michigan Opera Theatre. “I began to move away from the musicals at the end of the 1980s because I found that with national tours coming out of Broadway there were a lot of great old musicals being revived. So I felt there was not a vacuum, which there was with operettas. If that repertory is to be revived, certainly the opera companies are the only ones that have the resources to give them the kind of musical substance they deserve.”

‘Countess Maritza” is precisely the kind of operetta that supporters claim should earn the genre higher esteem. It demands not only precise musicianship but also tireless attention to pacing and detail.

“I sometimes remind the cast that there’s a curveball coming around the corner on every page of the score,” says Crosby. “In the nature of operetta, there is a certain improvisational element in the pacing of the music--particularly in Kalman. Ultimately, it takes a certain relaxation to do it.”

Then too, there is the added hurdle of the spoken word. “I have to be fully aware of the pacing of the dialogue,” says Crosby. “If a singer ends a sentence and the music comes in right after that, I don’t want you sitting around waiting to hear the music. I have to set up the orchestra while the singer is still speaking, so I have to know always the exact speed of that line.

“Then there are many places where there is spoken dialogue accompanied by the orchestra, and we have to finish at the same time, so I must be listening to the dialogue as we’re playing the music, adjusting the speed to make sure that we finish at the same point.”

Not surprisingly, there aren’t that many opera artists who can satisfy operetta’s demands. “You’re dealing with a whole different set of personalities because these are those very rare artists that are triple-threat: that can sing, act and dance,” says Brovsky.

“You sort of know how to deal with your standard diva. Someone who’s going to sing Tosca, you know where she’s going to be worried or neurotic about it. But with the triple-threat group, you also have to be careful about where you push them and where you don’t push them.”

“Countess Maritza” has a seasoned cast--including soprano Ashley Putnam in the title role-- hand-picked to meet the operetta’s demands.

The story, which was taken to the Hungarian Kalman by the librettists Alfred Grunwald and Julius Brammer, concerns a wealthy countess who returns from Vienna to her Hungarian estate. She sets out to fend off her gold-digging suitors by announcing her engagement to a fictional baron. When a man bearing the baron’s name actually shows up, confusion ensues.

Musically and dramatically, there are ways in which the work, which premiered in 1924 Vienna, prefigures the American musical. “In my scenes, the music is very Gershwin-esque--the beats, verses and refrains are very similar,” says Constance Hauman, who sings the role of Countess Lisa. “It really is like a preview of what was to become popular. Every moment [I’m] in is really like Cole Porter, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Gershwin.”

“Countess Maritza,” which enjoyed a successful Broadway run in 1926, includes 21 dance numbers in a wide range of styles. “Even though it’s a Viennese operetta, it’s much more rooted in the Hungarian folk dance tradition than in Viennese waltz,” says choreographer Daniel Pelzig. “This is a remarkable score that is really yet unheard in this country.”

Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, which had shown interest in Kalman’s operettas in the 1930s, did take “Countess Maritza” as far as a screen test in the early 1940s, although the project was not filmed. There was also a revival of the work at the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey in 1942.

For the most part, however, Kalman’s works had languished in this country for decades, until the composer’s daughter Yvonne decided to take up the cause.

Encouraged in part by Kalman centennial productions of “Countess Maritza” and “The Gypsy Princess” at London’s Sadlers Wells in 1982, she began a campaign to encourage companies to take a look at what the composer had to offer.

Thanks in part to her efforts, the Vienna Volksoper--a company basically devoted to operetta--brought “The Gypsy Princess” to New York’s Lincoln Center in 1984, where it did well.

Yvonne Kalman then continued her efforts in Australia, where she moved in the mid-1980s. Although her father’s works had never had major productions there, the Australian Opera successfully staged both “Countess Maritza” and “The Gypsy Princess” during the 1980s.

Yvonne Kalman returned to the U.S. in the early 1990s and began lobbying American operas. “I cut out clippings, sent reviews, called and got on a lot of people’s nerves, actually,” she recalls.

The 1995 staging of “Countess Maritza,” which is slated for Washington, D.C., after L.A. and for a return to Santa Fe in 1999, was given 10 performances in Santa Fe. “It ended up doing very well,” says marketing director Tom Morris. “There was great word of mouth.

“We sold about 1,700 tickets per performance, which is about 83% sales. That same year, we did ‘La Fanciulla del West’ and more people were going to ‘Maritza’ than the Puccini.”

Such success suggests that, work by work, the attitude toward operetta may be changing.

Says Yvonne Kalman: “A lot of people that one had trouble getting to even come to the telephone [now] have a new sense of awareness that if [operetta] worked as well as it did for Santa Fe, it might work once again for them.”

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* “The Mikado,” Opera Pacific, Orange County Performing Arts Center, Costa Mesa. Today only, 2 p.m. $28 to $131. (714) 474-4488.

* “The Pirates of Penzance,” Luckman Fine Arts Complex, Cal State L.A. campus, 5151 State University Drive. Today only, 3 p.m. $15 to $32.50. (213) 343-6600.

* “Countess Maritza,” L.A. Opera, Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, L.A. Music Center, 135 N. Grand Ave., downtown. Nov. 22, 7 p.m. (benefit gala); Nov. 25 and Dec. 2, 5 and 7, 7:30 p.m.; Nov. 29, 1 p.m. $24 to $135. (213) 365-3500.