Light Opera Oklahoma
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Light Opera Oklahoma
LOOK Musical Theatre (LOOK) was a professional musical theatre company based in Tulsa, Oklahoma. The organization, governed by an elected board of directors, followed a repertory model in presenting a summer festival program of musicals and comic opera. LOOK's annual summer season of performances at the Tulsa Performing Arts Center was known as "The LOOK Festival." The company was founded by John and Jane Everett in 1983 as a non-profit community theater called The Gilbert and Sullivan Society of Tulsa."The Glamour of Evil"
''Urban Tulsa Weekly'', June 6, 2007
It changed its name to Light Opera Oklahoma in 1997 in conjunction with its transformation into a professional repertory company and expanded its repertoire to works outside the corpus of

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Musical Theatre
Musical theatre is a form of theatrical performance that combines songs, spoken dialogue, acting and dance. The story and emotional content of a musical – humor, pathos, love, anger – are communicated through words, music, movement and technical aspects of the entertainment as an integrated whole. Although musical theatre overlaps with other theatrical forms like opera and dance, it may be distinguished by the equal importance given to the music as compared with the dialogue, movement and other elements. Since the early 20th century, musical theatre stage works have generally been called, simply, musicals. Although music has been a part of dramatic presentations since ancient times, modern Western musical theatre emerged during the 19th century, with many structural elements established by the works of Gilbert and Sullivan in Britain and those of Harrigan and Hart in America. These were followed by the numerous Edwardian musical comedies and the musical theatre w ...
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D'Oyly Carte Opera Company
The D'Oyly Carte Opera Company is a professional British light opera company that, from the 1870s until 1982, staged Gilbert and Sullivan's Savoy operas nearly year-round in the UK and sometimes toured in Europe, North America and elsewhere. The company was revived for short seasons and tours from 1988 to 2003, and since 2013 it has co-produced four of the operas with Scottish Opera. In 1875 Richard D'Oyly Carte asked the dramatist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan to collaborate on a short comic opera to round out an evening's entertainment. When that work, ''Trial by Jury'', became a success, Carte put together a syndicate to produce a full-length Gilbert and Sullivan work, ''The Sorcerer'' (1877), followed by ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' (1878). After ''Pinafore'' became an international sensation, Carte jettisoned his difficult investors and formed a new partnership with Gilbert and Sullivan that became the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company. The company produced the succeeding ...
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Naughty Marietta (operetta)
''Naughty Marietta'' is an operetta in two acts, with libretto by Rida Johnson Young and music by Victor Herbert. Set in New Orleans in 1780, it tells how Captain Richard Warrington is commissioned to unmask and capture a notorious French pirate calling himself "Bras Pique" – and how he is helped and hindered by a high-spirited runaway, Contessa Marietta. The score includes many well-known songs, including "Ah! Sweet Mystery of Life". ''Naughty Marietta'' had its first performance on October 24, 1910, in Syracuse, New York, and opened on Broadway on November 7, 1910, playing for 136 performances at the New York Theatre. It enjoyed revivals in 1929 at Jolson's 59th Street Theatre and in 1931 at Erlanger's Theatre. The operetta became Victor Herbert's greatest success. A film version of ''Naughty Marietta'' was released by MGM in 1935 starring Jeanette MacDonald and Nelson Eddy. A television version of the operetta was broadcast live in the United States on January 15, 1955, ...
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The Yeomen Of The Guard
''The Yeomen of the Guard; or, The Merryman and His Maid'', is a Savoy Opera, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert. It premiered at the Savoy Theatre on 3 October 1888 and ran for 423 performances. This was the eleventh collaboration of fourteen between Gilbert and Sullivan. The opera is set in the Tower of London during the 16th century, and is the darkest, and perhaps most emotionally engaging, of the Savoy Operas, ending with a broken-hearted main character and two very reluctant engagements, rather than the usual numerous marriages. The libretto does contain considerable humour, including a lot of pun-laden one-liners, but Gilbert's trademark satire and topsy-turvy plot complications are subdued in comparison with the other Gilbert and Sullivan operas. The dialogue, though in prose, is quasi-William Shakespeare, Shakespearean, or Early Modern English, early modern English, in style. Critics considered the score to be Sullivan's finest, including its ...
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The Desert Song
''The Desert Song'' is an operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Otto Harbach and Frank Mandel. It was inspired by the 1925 uprising of the Riffs, a group of Moroccan fighters, against French colonial rule. It was also inspired by stories of Lawrence of Arabia aiding native guerrillas. Many tales romanticizing Arab North Africa were in vogue, including ''Beau Geste'' and ''The Son of the Sheik''.Traubner, Richard. ''Operetta: A Theatrical History'', pp. 387–89 (2003) Routledge
Originally titled "Lady Fair", after successful out-of-town tryouts in

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Cox & Box
''Cox and Box; or, The Long-Lost Brothers'', is a one-act comic opera with a libretto by F. C. Burnand and music by Arthur Sullivan, based on the 1847 farce '' Box and Cox'' by John Maddison Morton. It was Sullivan's first successful comic opera. The story concerns a landlord who lets a room to two lodgers, one who works at night and one who works during the day. When one of them has the day off, they meet each other in the room and tempers flare. Sullivan wrote this piece five years before his first opera with W. S. Gilbert, ''Thespis''. The piece premiered in 1866 and was seen a few times at charity benefits in 1867. Once given a professional production in 1869, it became popular, running for 264 performances and enjoying many revivals and further charity performances. During the 20th century, it was frequently played by the D'Oyly Carte Opera Company in an abridged version, as a curtain raiser for the shorter Gilbert and Sullivan operas. It has been played by numerous professi ...
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Ernest In Love
''Ernest in Love'' is a musical with a book and lyrics by Anne Croswell and music by Lee Pockriss. It is based on ''The Importance of Being Earnest'', Oscar Wilde's classic 1895 comedy of manners. Background The two-act musical is an expanded version of the hour-long musical ''Who's Earnest?'' televised on ''The United States Steel Hour'' in 1957.Suskin, Steven."On the Record: Ernest In Love, Marco Polo, Puppets and Maury Yeston", Playbill.com, August 10, 2003. The 1959-1960 Off-Broadway season included a dozen musicals and revues including ''Little Mary Sunshine'', ''The Fantasticks'' (based on an obscure 1894 work by Edmond Rostand, of Cyrano fame), and ''Ernest in Love'', a musicalization of Oscar Wilde's 1895 hit. The production was directed by Harold Stone and choreographed by Frank Derbas. It opened on May 4, 1960, at the Gramercy Arts Theatre, where it was warmly received by the critics but ran for only 103 performances. The cast included Louis Edmonds as Algernon, John ...
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The Pirates Of Penzance
''The Pirates of Penzance; or, The Slave of Duty'' is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, W. S. Gilbert. Its official premiere was at the Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City on 31 December 1879, where it was well received by both audiences and critics. Its London debut was on 3 April 1880, at the Opera Comique, where it ran for 363 performances. The story concerns Frederic, who, having completed his 21st year, is released from his apprenticeship to a band of tender-hearted pirates. He meets the daughters of Major-General Stanley, including Mabel, and the two young people fall instantly in love. Frederic soon learns, however, that he was born on the 29th of February, and so, technically, he has a birthday only once each leap year. His indenture specifies that he remain apprenticed to the pirates until his "twenty-first birthday", meaning that he must serve for another 63 years. Bound by his own sense of duty, Freder ...
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The Student Prince
''The Student Prince'' is an operetta in four acts with music by Sigmund Romberg and book and lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly. It is based on Wilhelm Meyer-Förster's play '' Old Heidelberg''. The piece has a score with some of Romberg's most enduring and beautiful tunes, including "Golden Days", "Drinking Song", "Deep in My Heart, Dear", "Just We Two" and "Serenade" ("Overhead the moon is beaming"). The plot has elements of melodrama but lacks the swashbuckling style common to Romberg's other works. It opened on December 2, 1924, at Jolson's 59th Street Theatre on Broadway and became the most successful of Romberg's works, running for 608 performances. It was staged by J. C. Huffman and was the longest-running Broadway show of the 1920s. Even the classic ''Show Boat'', the most enduring musical of the 1920s, did not play as long – it ran for 572 performances. "Drinking Song", with its rousing chorus of "Drink! Drink! Drink!" was especially popular with theatergoers in 1924, a ...
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Pineapple Poll
''Pineapple Poll'' is a Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired comic ballet, created by choreographer John Cranko with arranger Sir Charles Mackerras. ''Pineapple Poll'' is based on "The Bumboat Woman's Story", one of W. S. Gilbert's Bab Ballads, written in 1870. The Gilbert and Sullivan opera ''H.M.S. Pinafore'' was also based, in part, on this story. For the ballet, Cranko expanded the story of the Bab Ballad and added a happy ending. All the music is arranged from Sullivan's music. The piece premiered in 1951 at Sadler's Wells Theatre and was given many revivals internationally during the following decades. It remains in the repertoire of the Birmingham Royal Ballet. It has also been recorded many times. Background and productions Mackerras and his family were Gilbert and Sullivan fans. As a youth, at the all-male St Aloysius College in Sydney, he played Kate in ''The Pirates of Penzance'', Leila in ''Iolanthe'' and Ko-Ko in ''The Mikado''.Simeone, Nigel. "Sir Charles Mackerras (192 ...
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The New Moon
''The New Moon'' is an operetta with music by Sigmund Romberg and book and lyrics by Oscar Hammerstein II, Frank Mandel, and Laurence Schwab. The show was the third in a string of Broadway hits for Romberg (after ''The Student Prince'' (1924) and ''The Desert Song'' (1926)) written in the style of Viennese operetta. Set in 1792, shortly before the French Revolution, the story centers on a young French aristocrat in disguise, who has fled his country and falls in love with the daughter of a prominent New Orleans planter. It premiered in Philadelphia in 1927 and played on Broadway in 1928. It spawned a number of revivals and two film adaptations, and it remains popular with light opera companies. The piece turned out to be "Broadway's last hit operetta", as World War II and the Golden Age of musicals approached. Performance history ''The New Moon'' debuted in Philadelphia on Christmas Eve, 1927. The tryout was a failure, and the show was extensively revised before another tryout ...
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The Mikado
''The Mikado; or, The Town of Titipu'' is a comic opera in two acts, with music by Arthur Sullivan and libretto by W. S. Gilbert, their ninth of fourteen Gilbert and Sullivan, operatic collaborations. It opened on 14 March 1885, in London, where it ran at the Savoy Theatre for 672 performances, the second-longest run for any work of musical theatre and one of the longest runs of any theatre piece up to that time.The longest-running piece of musical theatre was the operetta ''Les Cloches de Corneville'', which held the title until ''Dorothy (opera), Dorothy'' opened in 1886, which pushed ''The Mikado'' down to third place. By the end of 1885, it was estimated that, in Europe and America, at least 150 companies were producing the opera.H. L. Mencken, Mencken, H. L.]Article on ''The Mikado'', ''Baltimore Evening Sun'', 29 November 1910 ''The Mikado'' is the most internationally successful Savoy opera and has been especially popular with amateur and school productions. The work has ...
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