Concert Operetta's "Gypsy Princess' (1st review)

He's a prince. She's a cabaret singing star, "a woman of the people with a contract in America." He commits himself to marriage before she leaves for her American tour, but his father orders him home, to announce his engagement to a more suitable fiancée.

Their romance takes place in Budapest and Vienna (where else?), to the accompaniment of humorous dialogue and a banquet of song. At every opportunity, the protagonists launch into musical enticements whose titles summarize the profound moral teachings of Viennese operetta— "Life is Worth Living," "Grasp with Open Arms," "Let Me Dance and Let Me Sing."

They sing about romance, which creates "Loveliness All Around." They revel, male and female, in the knowledge that "Girls are the Thing for the Gents." They proclaim that "Cupid Isn't Stupid" and, then again, maybe he is.

The plot of The Gypsy Princess (1915) resembles Sigmund Romberg's most famous operetta, The Student Prince (1924), but the Hungarian composer Emmerich Kálmán applied a lighter touch. In Romberg's version of the story, the prince abandons his youthful romance and assumes the responsibilities of royalty. The Gypsy Princess ends with the revelation that the prince's mother was herself a cabaret star, unbeknown to her husband, who must admit that "High Kicking Hilda" has made a satisfactory consort.

The other woman

The treatment of Prince Edwin's official fiancée is a good example of The Gypsy Princess's essential buoyancy. In other hands, the fiancée might have been an ice-cold aristocrat.

Instead, Countess Stasi is an attractive young woman: a levelheaded, intelligent orphan who grew up with Edwin. They've been friends and confidantes since they were children. One of the operetta's most appealing scenes is the duet in which Edwin and Stasi envision the unromantic but pleasantly friendly life they will lead if they fulfill their elders' plans and marry.

Fortuitously, Stasi finds herself romantically attracted to Prince Edwin's funny friend, Count Boni, who is pretending he's married to Edwin's true love, Sylva, who has cooked up the masquerade so she can attend Edwin's engagement party and find out why he betrayed her, which he really hasn't because he thinks she deserted him, which leads to complications and misunderstandings that provide suitable excuses for the aforementioned musical enticements.

Lapse into nostalgia

Daniel Pantano's Concert Operetta Theater performs operettas concert-style, without scenery, but Pantano suggested the glamour of the operetta's setting with well-chosen gowns for the women performers as well as a profusion of glittering jewelry.

An operetta can work its magic without a setting, but it can't do it without a good cast. Pantano has won a loyal audience over the past 12 seasons by drawing on Philadelphia's pool of young, operatically trained vocalists.

In this production, mezzo-soprano Evelyn Rossow did such an appealing job as Countess Stasi that I was afraid she was going to upstage the leading lady, soprano Jennifer Holbrook. But Holbrook reclaimed her eminence when she dropped Sylva's extroverted showgirl exterior and produced an exceptionally touching lapse into nostalgia, "Where Are They Now?"

Rhythmic clapping

In the two male leads, Jeffrey Halili and John Matthew Myers proved that two tenors can occupy the same stage and convince the audience they're good friends. In addition to their technical vocal prowess, both created believable characters, Halili as the prince and Myers as the kind of sensible humorist a woman like Countess Stasi would find attractive.

Pantano's young singers all possess strong voices trained to fill opera halls that can accommodate audiences ten times larger than the seating at the Academy of Vocal Arts' tiny Helen Corning Warden Theater. The production would have gained had they put less effort into projection and more into clear pronunciation of the operetta's appealing lyrics.

But every creative enterprise has its weaknesses. Overall, Pantano's cast fulfilled the composer's intentions. The audience left the theater with smiling faces and the general air of people who'd been touched with fairy dust. They even burst into spontaneous clapping during a song based on Hungarian dances.

Some opera lovers believe that Viennese operetta achieves that effect by fogging our minds with the clueless dreams of a simpler, less tumultuous era. If that notion persists among any readers of this review, let them note that The Gypsy Princess received its premiere in Vienna in the year 1915. That was not, I believe, a time less troubled than our own.♦


To read another review by Steve Cohen, click here.