America has its own celebrated real-life ''merry widows'' - attractive, designing women who married much older, exceedingly wealthy men. Just as their unfolding sagas would make colorful soap opera fare, turn-of-the-20th-century audiences were drawn to these free-wheeling, independent-minded ladies as heroines of comic operettas, a popular entertainment of the day.
Indeed, far and away the most commercially successful operetta of the early 1900s was Austro-Hungarian composer Franz Lehar's ''The Merry Widow,'' which opened Dec. 30, 1905, at Vienna's Theater An der Wien and ran virtually uninterrupted for several seasons. Within a few years, it had conquered audiences throughout Europe, and the operetta's long New York run (416 performances) at Manhattan's New Amsterdam Theatre left an indelible imprint on the nation's budding musical theater scene.
From ''The Merry Widow,'' says opera impresario and director Michael Capasso in a telephone interview from his New York office, ''you can draw a line through the operettas of Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg to Jerome Kern's 'Show Boat' in 1927 - considered the first American musical - down to Rodgers and Hammerstein and on to Bernstein and Sondheim. It's the same structure, the same blueprint.'' Capasso's own 100th-anniversary production of Lehar's masterpiece, which played to ''utterly sold out'' audiences earlier this month at Manhattan's intimate Dicapo Opera Theatre, will be brought intact to the stage of Cape Cod Community College's Tilden Arts Center Sunday afternoon by National Lyric Opera, Dicapo's touring arm.
It will be the final stop in the company's trio of New England performances. Hosted by Opera New England of Cape Cod, the lavishly costumed English language production features a cast of 10 principals, a 38-voice chorus (including seven dancers) and a 27- piece orchestra. It will be led by music director Constantine Kitsopoulos, whose credits include award-winning Broadway musicals, as well as operas here and abroad.
The witty dialogue written by Wendy Wasserstein in 2001 will be used in honor of the popular American playwright, who died Jan. 30, at age 55, of cancer. At the time of its 1907 New York premiere, opera was elite and expensive, Capasso says, but operettas, performed in small downtown theaters, attracted the growing immigrant population.
In particular, ''The Merry Widow,'' despite changing tastes and fashions, never lost its appeal through the years and remains as a staple of the lighter operatic repertoire, combining the rich, cultivated voices of opera with the naturalness of spoken dialogue. Set in the flamboyant atmosphere of turn-of-the-century Paris, the opera's action moves from the embassy of Pontevedro (a fictional Balkan country) to the fashionable Parisian quarters of the recently widowed Anna Glawari, who has inherited her Pontevedrian banker husband's massive fortune. As the target of opportunistic French dandies, she is of serious concern to her country's ambassador, Baron Mirko Zeta.
He seeks to prevent her wealth from leaving the economically shaky country by marrying her off to Count Danilo Danilovitch, an embassy attach who was Anna's former suitor. Their plans to wed had been thwarted by his aristocratic father because of her low social status, so, instead, she married the much older Glawari. Now that Anna is free, Danilo, who had remained single, is torn between his rekindled affections and an abhorrence of appearing to be after her money.
When the couple's dilemma becomes entwined with a secret flirtation between the ambassador's high-spirited wife, Valencienne, and an impetuous young French officer, who is also publicly courting Anna, the plot becomes a maze of comedy. The tuneful score includes such enduring favorites as ''The Merry Widow Waltz'' and the haunting folk song ''Vilia,'' which Anna sings at her lavish second-act reception. ''People are endlessly charmed,'' says Capasso, who says this is his first production of a Lehar operetta .
''I think it might be time to do more of these kind of things. Audiences are responding to it. They want to be entertained and not necessarily challenged all the time.
Here they're just challenged to have a nice time. You don't have to think too hard. Pretty melodies, pretty scenery, pretty girls.
...
It doesn't gnaw at you, bring out your inner child, or anything like that. It's just pleasing to the ear and eye.'' Capasso says the physical production is spectacular.
''We built everything in our scene shop, and all the costumes are brand new. The women have three different changes and the men have two, including uniforms in the second act. .
.. Anna's gowns are breathtaking, in my opinion.
'' For the folk-dance presentation at Anna's party, the seven dancers wear red, blue and green Eastern European peasant costumes; they don glitzy attire for their last act can-can at Maxim's, a famous Parisian nightclub that still thrives on Rue Royale near Place de Concorde. ''I spent a day in Paris taking pictures of chairs and tables at Maxim's, so our sets could be as authentic as possible,'' Capasso says. Besides a growing list of operatic engagements here and abroad, soprano Laura Pederson will bring to her portrayal of Anna the experience of three years as the leading soprano at Bremen Opera in Germany, where operetta productions have remained popular.
Mike McGowan, who plays Danilo, was in ''The Producers'' on Broadway. Zeta will be played by Shakespearean actor Bill Van Horn. The flirtatious Valencienne will be sung by soprano Amy Lynn Grable, whose credits include a 2006 appearance as Valencienne in Lyric Opera of Kansas City's centennial production.
Tenor Robert Zimmerman will sing the role of the amorous French officer, Camille de Rosillon. Dustin Tucker will play Njegus, the harried embassy secretary, and Capasso will appear as Maxim's ''maitre d'hotel.'' As a seasoned producer-director of mostly Italian operas, Capasso says the Viennese repertoire ''actually requires more work.
It's the style. You have to keep it tight, light and constantly moving.'' Based on a none-too-successful 1861 play, ''The Ambassador's Attache,'' by the prolific French playwright Henri Meilhac, ''The Merry Widow'' has been called ''the queen of operettas,'' rivalled only by Johann Strauss' ''Die Fledermaus.
'' Its unprecedented popularity in the first decade of the 1900s set off a veritable ''Widow''-mania that inspired the lucrative merchandising of oversized hats, shoes, corsets, and even cigars named after the operetta. To top it off, there was also a ''Merry Widow'' cocktail: 1 ounces each of gin and sweet vermouth, with a dash of Pernod and bitters, strained over ice and garnished with a lemon twist. Salut!
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