First, an apology: We’ve recently had some difficulties with the pagination gods, resulting in pages of uneven length, some annoyingly short. We’ve managed a partial restoration,  are still working on it, and hope to have a complete resolution soon.

Second, an advance announcement: On Tuesday, Oct. 25, at 7:30 PM (ET), at the invitation of the Jussi Björling Societies of the USA and UK, I will be delivering a Zoom presentation on the singing of this technically exemplary tenor. It’ll be a little more than an hour in length, including some time for Q and A, and will be re-shown on Saturday, Oct. 29, at 12 noon. Non-members of the Society can receive a link here to this event; a small fee is involved. I will repeat this information on my next post (see below, at the end of today’s article), along with a little more detail on the content—but registration is open now. I hope you’ll join us. And to today’s unforeseen article:

I had resolved to hold my summer hiatus time inviolate. And if anything were to be allowed to invade, it would have to be some unanticipated event of major operatic importance. But after reading and receiving word-of-mouth about Most Happy in Concert, right over here at the Williamstown Theatre Festival, I changed my mind. As you may have heard, this show is derived from Frank Loesser’s The Most Happy Fella, which is one of the handful of American musicals that dwells in the borderland between entertainment and art, between the popular and classical cultures, between “the musical” and opera. It’s one of the best of that sort, from the time when that sort was emerging in some force. And since everything I had heard about this adaptation described an extreme form of some of the very things I’ve been writing about with respect to opera—could, if one were easily inclined to dystopian prophecy, even forecast a strain of operatic devolution—I thought it might be worth a look.

Besides, goings-on at WTF have special resonance for my wife, Molly Regan, and me, since for a decade from the mid-1980s to the mid-’90s, we spent nearly all of our summer time as members of the Festival’s acting company. For my opera-devotee readers who don’t follow American theatre, WTF, during a long heyday that began in the 1950s, occupied a position among summer festivals roughly equivalent to Santa Fe’s in the operatic world. It had a reputation, upheld frequently enough to be at least grudgingly deserved, for high artistic quality and, even more, for sheer ambition. Under the guidance of its longtime impresario, Nikos Psacharopoulos, and his immediate successors, it took on classics of world theatre (Chekhov and Turgenev, Brecht, Sheridan, Anouilh and Giraudoux, et al., plus the occasional Greek or Shakespearian classic), and American plays of proven worth, most notably those of Tennessee Williams. Prominent theatre actors returned summer after summer, as did a group of solid “working actors,” and bicoastal stars signed on for tempting roles. This continuity gave WTF something of the flavor of a resident company of performers familiar with one another’s work, as opposed to a producing entity jobbing people in. For decades, large audiences held steady for this menu, and for new plays or more obscure revivals on the company’s second, smaller stage.