

Dave Barry has always been a favorite of ours and I used
to give Mary a Dave Barry calendar for Christmas until he turned his talents
elsewhere. His humor was manifest in the production and
the afternoon was a true delight. Only
one thing was missed:
There was no Overture!
Actually, I wasn’t surprised. Overtures have been disappearing from
Broadway at an alarming rate, with only the revivals of classic shows, with
their big casts and big orchestras creating a mood by snippets of every strong
song in the score.

Testing my theory that Overtures are disappearing, I
looked at some 35 of the close to 100 shows I have on vinyl or disk; a
collection that started more than 35 years ago when some acting friends
introduced us to their practice of collecting every musical they saw. Although we have seen “Gypsy” on Broadway
with three different stars, we don’t buy all three Original Cast Recordings. We
often listen to shows at suppertime.
The concept of having an Overture in a Broadway musical came because early
Broadway musicals were a close relative of Opera. Most operas at the time had an Overture that
was written by the composer, often to assist the audience in how to identify
the different movements. Paradoxically,
the one overture most recognized by Americans ran all the movements
together. That would be the Overture to Rossini’s
William Tell, which people remember from 30 years of Brace Beemer using it for
background to “Hi Yo, Silver, away!”
Broadway Musical Overtures varied in several ways from those of opera,
one of the most significant being that they were rarely written by the musical
composer. More often the conductor of
the orchestra was given the score and a time limit to introduce the audience as
to what would be “memorable” songs, so they could whistle them as they left the
theater. The shows in my collection that had overtures more often
than not had this format but on occasion would have instead a Prologue, or occasionally
both a Prologue and an Overture.

And I’m told that one of the major reasons most
Symphony Orchestras and Opera Companies are in financial trouble is related. Classical music is labor intensive, as is
opera. The arts have benefitted less
from technology than industry has. More
the loss.
Next post will give a different slant on the Petreaus
Affair: from the perspective of a 25-year career officer’s wife. Mary weighs in!
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