10 Great Musicals for Opera Companies
There is a perennial debate, a strangely elitist one for the 21st century, about whether an opera company like Houston Grand Opera should perform musicals at all, and if we do, whether those musicals should be a part of the opera season. There is also quite a bit of magical thinking about musicals, that they are somehow money-saving or money-making, when they are neither. There are some who believe they simply aren’t operas, that they have no place in our genre at all, as though the operatic art was some kind of musical Dewey Decimal System, and the musicals got filed on the wrong shelf. It is true that the major Vienna, Paris, London, and New York City’s opera companies do not perform musicals, but that is in the context of their own urban areas; Houston is a totally different and unique urban animal.
Firstly, no narrow definition of what opera is ever got anyone anywhere, and it never furthered the art in the minds of the public. The Bayreuth Festival, which has only ever performed the operas of Richard Wagner (plus a performance of the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven) is a total anomaly in operatic history, and also against Wagner’s own wishes—he wanted the Festspielhaus to stand for only a few years and then be torn down to be rebuilt elsewhere. The American Musical is one of the major artistic achievements in our country, and it has its ancestry in European operetta, which was a parallel and highly related cousin to “grand” opera.
And just as there are dozens of subgenres within opera, so there are within musicals. The 21st-century fact is this: if these works are to be performed as their composers envisioned them, they have to be produced by opera companies, which in the case of a few of the musicals is reason enough to perform them. If audiences also find their way to us through these works, that is a great bonus as well. But what if some patrons only come to the Wortham for a musical? That, too, is a reason to welcome them, not to dig heels in and say, “this is not opera.” This is opera—because these are works that require cultivated voices, a major orchestra, and a serious audience.
The first groundbreaking collaboration of Rodgers and Hammerstein, and one of their greatest, both for its simplicity and sincerity, but also for the sheer melodic sweep of the story told in music. One of the proudest moments of American theater, and familiarity can make us forget how soaring it can be.
Frank Loesser’s hybrid opera/musical, set in California’s Napa Valley, is a musical wonder, and begging to be revived in an opera house. If you want to feel better about life, listen to this glorious piece of work.
From Tom Jones and Harvey Schmidt, the creators of The Fantasticks, which ran in New York City for 42 years. This elegiac work is based on N. Richard Nash’s play The Rainmaker, about a conman who claims to be able to bring rain to a drought-stricken town in the American southwest, and charms a local farmer’s daughter in the process, surprising himself with his own success.
Another forgotten Frank Loesser masterpiece, based on B.J. Chute’s fanciful novel, with a score that bursts with life and good feelings. We are unlikely to ever see it produced again, as it is enormous in scale and has huge scenic demands, but a guy can dream! The score is absolute beauty from beginning to end.
Stephen Sondheim’s sophisticated and urbane homage to the operettas of his mentor Oscar Hammerstein II’s youth, A Little Night Music features one of the greatest scores ever to emerge from Broadway. And it fits perfectly into an operatic season, a modern nod to a glorious past. HGO has performed the musical twice—in 1999 and in 2014.
Jerry Bock and Sheldon Harnick’s 1964 masterpiece has been successful at every scale of production from almost no scenery to the very elaborate. Fiddler on the Roof, thanks to its ravishing film version, has remained in the public imagination. The high-level score is now best realized in the context of an opera company, with all of the meanings of that wonderful word, company: a full virtuosic orchestra and a nuanced chorus, deep musical values, and a group of artisans who regularly come together for performance. Fiddler tells the story of a family and a community, which means it invites a community of artists.
An ambitious and wonderful musical by the composer Jerome Moross that resets the Trojan War dramas of the Iliad and the Odyssey in America, retelling them as a fanciful domestic drama. The show is neglected and forgotten now, and unlikely to be revived. But it would be worthwhile, especially for a small opera company, to give it a try.
From the composers of Fiddler on the Roof, Bock and Harnick, this absolutely delightful musical is best performed by an opera company. It is based on a 1937 Hungarian play, Parfumerie, but has been retold a number of times in three films. First came The Shop Around the Corner, the 1940 film that starred James Stewart and Margaret Sullavan. It was remade a few years later as a musical starring Judy Garland, In the Good Old Summertime, then remade again in 1998 in Nora Ephron’s film, You’ve Got Mail starring Tom Hanks and Meg Ryan. The musical is masterful from start to finish, and well worth performing.
Stephen Sondheim’s brilliant and gruesome magnum opus has been performed often with success at opera companies around the world. And for good reason: it requires operatic forces to fully realize its musical potential. Sondheim’s score for this tale of revenge and evil entrepreneurial zeal is famously operatic in scope. It is a tuneful wonder—if there is a more beautiful Broadway song than “Not While I’m Around,” I don’t know what it is. HGO has performed Sweeney Todd twice—in 1984 and in 2015.
This is an obvious choice for an opera audience, since it was composed by Rodgers and Hammerstein specifically to fit between the worlds of opera and the commercial theater, exemplified by its original stars, the opera bass Ezio Pinza and the darling of mid-century Broadway, Mary Martin. Its themes of racial and national tolerance remain, sadly, as relevant as they did in 1950, when South Pacific won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama.
Both intensely obvious choices, though most often unavailable to opera companies because they are both still so viable in the commercial theater, and the companies that own them are unwilling to give away their licenses to the small-potatoes box office of opera companies.
