Revivals

Twenty years ago, when gentlemen wore starched cuffs and ladies hid in corsets, musical shows were romantic, exotic and historical. The best of them, known as operettas, became minor classics and were repeatedly performed by stock light-opera companies throughout the U. S. During the peak years of U. S. operetta (1910-20), four composers dominated the field: Irish-born Victor Herbert (Naughty Marietta, etc.), Bohemian-born Charles Rudolph Friml (Katinka), Hungarian-born Sigmund Romberg (In Blossom Time), and Manhattan-born Jerome David Kern (Sally, Show Boat, etc.).

Operetta is no longer what it used to be. But last month Los Angeles launched a swank season of operetta revivals, and similar festivals have been scheduled for this summer in Louisville, Cleveland, St. Louis, as well as in Manhattan's Randall's Island and Long Island's Jones Beach. Most important of these festivals, that of the 20-year-old St. Louis Municipal Theater Association, opened last week with a repertory that included such old-timers as Chimes of Normandy, Rosalie, Show Bout, and Roberta, such latter-day specimens as White Horse Inn. Opener for the twelve-week festival was a brand new work by owl-faced Old-timer Jerome Kern entitled Gentlemen Unafraid. With a Civil-Wartime libretto carpentered by the experienced hands of Otto Harbach and Oscar Hammerstein II, Gentlemen Unafraid maintained the best swashbuckling, love & war traditions of the Herbert era.

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