What is this thing called operetta?
This funny thing, called operetta...
Just from looking at the word, you can tell that it's a little closer to opera than other non-opera forms of musical theatre. One of the things that distinguishes musicals is that the music is no more important than the words or story. (Well, sometimes the story's of less importance.) In opera, music is king, and fans often care more how beautifully a role is sung than they do how well it's acted. In musicals, acting is king, and some of the great stars of the genre (Gwen Verdon, Nathan Lane, Carol Channing) don't even have particularly pleasant voices. Try getting away with that in opera!
Operettas, too, tip the balance in favor of the music. Ultimately, in an operetta, the beauty of the music is somewhat more important than what's being said. To our modern ears, operetta seem a bit silly, and my belief is that their stories were never meant to be taken all that seriously. They're not down-to-earth; they're unashamedly over-the-top.
From reading Gerald Bordman's book on the subject I got the notion that operettas are set in exotic times and/or places. The desert. Ruritania. An island in the Caribbean during the French revolution. Company, for instance, is set in New York city, present-day. You won't find an operetta doing that.
Now here's the statement everyone's going to argue with: there hasn't been a new operetta produced on Broadway in roughly 50 years. I'm thinking of Kismet. Actually, I think of Kismet as a musical, not an operetta (noting the great verbal wit in its lyrics) but I can see how a pretty good argument can be made that it's an operetta. And spoofs, such as Little Mary Sunshine, Candide, and my own Pulley of the Yard, or, Murder of the Savoy - are just that: spoofs. You've not really written an operetta if your attempt is to send-up the genre; you've lampooned the form, not embraced it.
Some say A Little Night Music is an operetta, and I'd agree that Scandanvia's a somewhat exotic place and the music aspires to an operetta-like frothiness. But the lyrics are incredibly important, and the book scenes, most of them, play very realistically. For these reasons, A Little Night Music isn't an operetta.
So, what operettas have been written and produced in the past 50 years?
