PEOPLE OFTEN ASK ME: Master, what is the difference between opera and musicals? To which I say: well, duh! — people like musicals. Actually, this has also dawned on the dimwits who run our opera houses, and every so often they attach their rather flaccid suckers to the lucrative market by sticking on Oklahoma! or something, which you might call “introducing the piece to a narrower audience”.
It’s totally not fair, of course: musicals, at least in their origins, are very much ours, and while you can keep , we’d droning of Wagner and , except now I come to think of it is also about romantic mix-ups on a boat, and so is — Cole Porter, Richard Rodgers and so on are the unmistakeable love-children of Offenbach, Strauss and Sullivan, and you can’t always tell which way the blanket is turned.
