CARNEGIE AT GAITHERSBURG: WEDNESDAY MORNINGS, SEPTEMBER 17 TO DECEMBER 10, 2025

VIDEO PREVIEW      ARTIST BIOS      SYLLABUS (flat)     SYLLABUS (foldable)
CLASSES:    [1]    [2]    [3]    [4]    [5]    [6]    [7]    [8]    [9]    [10]    [11]    [12]

 
Comedy in Song

Audiences first flocked to Broadway to laugh; the word "musicals" is short for "musical comedies." Though laughter is no longer a requirement in musicals today, the tradition goes back at least to the comic operas of Mozart and Rossini or the satires of Gilbert and Sullivan. And you don't even need a theater; the songbook is packed with numbers that are funny in their own right, whether performed in a club or recorded back in the day on a 78. Comedy can take the form of outrageous farces that make you laugh out loud, but it can also be quite subtle, evoking the smile of wry recognition rather than the belly laugh. We will try to break this down, looking at comedy of all kinds over a wide range of media; the only requirement is that it should involve singers delivering well-crafted words, preferably in a staged context.

Most classes will focus on a featured work. A couple of these will be short operas played complete: Puccini's Gianni Schicchi and Ravel's L'enfant et les sortilèges. There will be at least one double-header: Offenbach's La Périchole with Orpheus in the Underworld, which ends with the famous can-can. We will continue the theme of FARCE with Rossini's Le Comte Ory and Charles Strouse's Annie, and move from there to Mozart's Così fan tutte, which gives farce a disturbing human edge. Gilbert and Sullivan's Mikado introduces the idea of SATIRE, which we continue with humorists such as Noel Coward and Tom Lehrer. Smetana's The Bartered Bride, a rural ROMANCE with a heady splash of local color, takes us in turn to the colorful FANTASIES of Andrew Lloyd Webber's CATS, the aformentioned Ravel opera about animals and household objects coming to life, and Sondheim's fairy-tale mash-up Into the Woods.

In all this, the emphasis is on fun. In building the course, I have looked for the best videos of the most brilliant stage performances; there is little or no film. Yes, there may be some unfamiliar operas in the list, but their music is tuneful, the productions are inventive, and the videos have titles; I trust the musicals will speak for themselves. The Puccini and Ravel operas are short enough to be played complete and discussed in class. For longer shows, I will play extended scenes or an overview of the entire work, preceded by shorter clips for context. Come prepared for new discoveries—and above all, get ready to laugh!

The images below do not necessarily come from the productions to be shown in class. One by one, I will add RESOURCES for each session, at which point the current grey links will be activated and turn gold. rb.

	September 17
Theatre audience laughing	RESOURCES

1. The Comic Vision

We all know the kind of comedy that makes us laugh out loud: a farcical situation, a slick stage routine, a witty line. But there are other kinds of comedy too. Satire, for example, whether social or political. Parody. Fantasy, fairy tale, and make-believe. A romance that goes through many vicissitudes before the happy ending. Or simply an acceptance of the oddities of human nature that leads to a wry smile rather than a belly-laugh. This introductory class will give examples of all of these, illustrated with clips that could not fit as classes of their own.

	September 24
Orpheus in the Underworld at Salzburg	RESOURCES

2. Cancan/Cachucha

Although the idea of sung comedy on stage derives from the opera buffa of the early 19th century (see next week's class) and an operatic tradition going back to the commedia dell'arte of the 17th century, the man who put operetta on the map as the inspiration for modern musical theatre was undoubtedly the German-French composer Jacques Offenbach (1819–80). We look at two works: Orpheus in the Underworld (1858), a classical spoof in which Eurydice actually wants to stay in Hades, and La Périchole (1868), about a penniless street singer in 18th-century Peru who manipulates the attentions of a lecherous Viceroy to finance her eventual marriage to her true love.

	October 1
Juan Diego Florez in Le Comte Ory at the Met	RESOURCES

3. Opera Buffa

After writing a dozen comic operas in Italian (plus at least as many serious ones), Gioacchino Rossini (1792–1868) wrote one last example for Paris, Le Comte Ory (1828). It is about a lecherous medieval Count who hopes to seduce the Countess Adèle, whose protector is away on the Crusades (together with all other men in the village). As she is known for her piety, Ory first disguises himself as a holy hermit. When that fails, he and his men dress up as nuns seeking refuge for for the night. This enables Ory to gain access to Adèle's bedroom. What he does not know is that Isolier, his page, has already worked his way into Adèle's affections, and is there in the bed before him. The resultant trio is a masterpiece of operatic comedy.

	October 8
Annie Live! 2021	RESOURCES

4. Two Annies

The Annie in the picture is a 2021 stage performance of the 1977 musical by Charles Strouse (1928-2025). A Cinderella story set in the Great Depression, it tells of how orphan Annie is adopted by the billionaire Oliver Warbucks, who pledges to help her find her real parents, enlisting the help of FDR and the newly-formed FBI. But why call the class "Two Annies"? Partly because the effect of this stage production is quite different from the celebrated film of 1982, and I intend to compare them. And partly because the musical comes at the end of three decades of change on Broadway, during which Farce is gradually replaced by Sentiment as the dominant aesthetic. By comparing the Strouse Annie of 1977 with the similarly-named Annie Get Your Gun of 1946 by Irving Berlin (1888–1989), we can spot some of these changes as they happen.

	October 15
A production of Gianni Schicchi in Croatia	RESOURCES

5. A Family Show

A complete opera today! Gianni Schicchi (1918), the one-act comedy by Giacomo Puccini (1858–1924), is the last great flowering of the opera buffa tradition. Florence, 1300: the contentious relatives of the wealthy Buoso Donati discover that their ancestor has largely written them out of his will. Enter the trickster Gianni Schicchi, whose daughter Lauretta is in love with Buoso's grandson Rincuccio. Moved by her plea "O mio babbino caro"—surely opera's most famous aria—Schicchi dresses up as the dying man in order to dictate a new will. But he turns the tables on the greedy throng and drives them out of the house where the young couple can be alone.

	October 22
Jonathan Miller's production of The Mikado at the ENO	RESOURCES

6. Satire on Stage

Inspired by the designs on Japanese prints and ceramics, WS Gilbert (1836–1911) imagined an absurd Japan whose administration was arbitrary and discipline draconian. Set to music by Sir Arthur Sullivan (1842–1900), this became The Mikado (1885), the most successful of the pair's Savoy Operas. Of course the audiences realized that this picture-book Japan was not real, but a satire on the English political scene. Nevertheless, many modern companies have avoided charges of cultural appropriation by removing Asian references. Jonathan Miller's 1986 production for the English National Opera, set in a resort hotel in the Twenties, was one of the first and still the cleverest; it is the one we shall watch.

	October 29
Noel Coward (top) and Tom Lehrer	RESOURCES

7. Satire In Song

English actor, playwright, composer, and occasional painter Noël Coward (1899–1973) was a Renaissance man who also occasionally appeared as a solo singer, cultivating a dapper theatrical persona as mouthipece for some sharp social criticism. Fast forward three decades to Tom Lehrer (1928– ), a mathematician who worked at Los Alamos and taught at MIT—before devoting himself largely to a career singing his own songs at the piano, their subjects becoming progressively more satirical as America entered the Vietnam era. The class will surely fast-forward several decades beyond that, but these details have yet to be worked out.

	November 5
Così fan tutte in Dresden	RESOURCES

8. When Farce Gets Real

The basic plot of Così fan tutte ("That's women for you!", 1790), the third collaboration between composer Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart (1756–91) and librettist Lorenzo da Ponte, is every bit as farcical as anything to follow by Rossini. A pair of young men take a bet with a cynical older friend that their fiancées are chastity incarnate. To prove their contention, they have to disguise themselves as foreigners and each try to seduce the other's girl. But when both women succumb, all four have to face some painful reckoning about their moral values—and this is no longer farcical at all.

	November 12
The Bartered Bride at the Garsington Opera	RESOURCES

9. Local Color

The Bartered Bride (1864), the only one of the eight operas by Bedrich Smetana (1824–84) to have found a place in the international repertoire, is an early example of a spate of works by Eastern European composers in the later 19th century that celebrate the culture and folklore of their native lands. It is the story of a young man who, in order to marry the girl he loves, angers everyone by making a deal with a marriage-broker to give her to someone else, knowing that he will be the one to claim her when all is said and done. The opera is full of musical ensembles and folk dances, and the arrival of a circus troupe in the third act kicks the local color into higher gear. We have the choice between a Viennese stage production, a Czech film, and an inventive updating to Britain in the 1960s.

	November 19
Rum Tum Tugger and admirers in CATS	RESOURCES

10. The Jellicle Ball

Andrew Lloyd Webber (1948– ) originally conceived of CATS as an unstaged setting of TS Eliot's whimsical poems for children, Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats (1939)—pure fantasy. But director Trevor Nunn convinced him that it could work as a stage musical if the separate numbers were connected by a story, and proceded to provide one, plus the text of the most famous number, "Memory." The resultant show (1981), in which cats of all sorts and sizes gather for the annual Jellicle Ball, is often cited as the first mega-musical. Nunn's original production ran for 21 years in London's West End and 18 years on Broadway.

	December 3
L'enfant et les sortilèges in Clermont-Ferrand	RESOURCES

11. Magical Morality Tale

Another one-act opera to be played complete in class. Maurice Ravel (1875–1937) wrote L'enfant et les sortilèges (literally "The child and the enchantments" or The Bewtiched Child) between 1917 and 1925 as a companion piece to his previous one-act L'heure espagnole (1907). The novelist Colette originally wrote the text as scenario for a fairy ballet, but Ravel persuaded her that it would work better as a musical along the lines of the new shows by Gershwin and others that were arriving in France. Some references to American jazz remain in the opera, and it contains a lot of dancing, but the resultant piece in which the objects in the house and animals in the garden come to life to teach a naughty child a lesson is absolutely one of a kind.

	December 10
A collegiate performance of Into the Woods in El Paso	RESOURCES

12. The Witch in the Woods

What better source for a fantasy musical than fairy tales from those masters of fantasy, the Brothers Grimm? In this case four of them: Little Red Ridinghood, Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and Rapunzel, with characters from several other tales thrown in along the way—all held together by a vindictive but ultimately benevolent Witch. Fresh off their 1984 collaboration Sunday in the Park with George, writer James Lapine concocted this splendid mash-up for Stephen Sondheim (1930–2021). Debuting on Broadway in 1987 as Into the Woods, the show became one of the composer's most successful, running for 765 performances and spawning several revivals and a Disney movie. It is also a favorite for collegiate and community groups, in productions like the one shown above.

 
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