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Forgotten John Philip Sousa opera revived

By FREDERICK M. WINSHIP
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NEW YORK, April 29 (UPI) -- "The Glassblowers," a forgotten light opera by March King John Philip Sousa, has been revived by the New York City Opera to wind up its spring season at Lincoln Center with a flag-waving patriotic work appropriate for a nation at war.

Written in 1909, "The Glassblowers" is about an America galvanized for war against imperialist Spain in 1898, a conflict that won possession of Puerto Rico and Guam and the chance to purchase the Philippines for the United States and independence for Cuba. It is the first Sousa operetta to be staged since his most popular work for the theater, "El Capitan," had a flurry of revivals several decades ago.

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Sousa's musical score is a many-splendored delight, including patter songs, waltzes, rousing choruses, a four-part madrigal, and a stirring march, "From Maine to Oregon." But librettist Leonard Liebling's book is weak, never rising above the vapid fluff that passed for popular Broadway stage fare at the turn of the last century.

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"The Glassblowers," Sousa's 10th light opera, had a Broadway run in 1913 under another title, "The American Maid," but it was not as popular as "El Capitan" and disappeared into oblivion until rescued by William Martin, a stage director, and Jerrold Fisher, a conductor and arranger, specialists in Sousa's stage works.

Martin has fashioned a libretto from original prompt books and other fragmentary source materials, and Fisher, a conductor and arranger, has reconstructed the music from piano scores and incomplete manuscript orchestrations. Jonathan Sheffer, who is making an impressive City Opera debut as conductor of "The Glassblowers," altered the orchestration to give it more varied sound.

City Opera has put on the show as a period piece with what looks like a cast of thousands, although there are only 20 named characters plus a large chorus. It's just that director Christopher Alden has them working harder at a more frenetic pace than any other company cast in recent memory.

The first act focuses on New York's new industrial society made up of millionaires anxious to marry their daughters off to other millionaires' sons or preferably to a foreign title, no matter how impoverished. The sensational marriage of Consuelo Vanderbilt to the Duke of Marlborough in 1895 echoes loudly in "The Glassblowers."

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Colonel Vanderveer, a Wall Street tycoon, is pushing his daughter, Annabelle, into marriage with a rich young lay-about, Jack Bartlett. And Silas Pompton, owner of the Consolidated Glass Works, has his eye on the British Duke of Branford for his daughter, Geraldine. The trouble is that Annabelle is leftist inclined and wants a husband who works for a living, and Geraldine is a new rich snob who wants to be kept by a husband, not the keeper of one.

When it appears that the Duke prefers Annabelle, Geraldine and Jack -- who has gotten a job at the glass works to prove his love for Annabelle -- impulsively announce their engagement. But all plans are put on hold when Annabelle's father is ruined financially by Geraldine's unscrupulous father and Annabelle has to go to work at the glass works too.

Act 2 finds Jack leading the union movement at the glassworks, thus redeeming himself in the eyes of Annabelle, and volunteering along with most of the other factory workers for military service when the United States declares war on Spain. Annabelle leads a force of Red Cross nurses that heads for Cuba on the Pompton yacht.

The war is won after a raid on Santiago led by Jack, who subsequently outwits Pompton's chicanery and restores the Vanderveer fortune. Jack gets Annabelle, and the Duke, also a war hero, gets Geraldine, who has been just the girl to grace his ancestral castle all along.

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Jeffrey Lentz, a spirited young singer with lovely light tenor, makes an attractive Jack, and coloratura soprano Anna Christy is winningly pert in her City Opera debut as Annabelle. Baritone Richard Whitehouse, also making his debut with the company, is sympathetic as the good-natured duke, but mezzo-soprano Jennifer Dudley never makes her Geraldine come alive.

Contralto Myrna Paris is amusingly grand in the role of the socially ambitious Mrs. Vanderveer, probably drawn originally as a parody of Mrs. William Astor, leader of New York's "400" society, and tenor Kenneth Morris creates the perfect caricature of a robber baron as Pompton. Also effective as a comic working-class couple are Steve Routman as Stumpy and Kristin Maloney as Rose.

Designer John Conklin's treasure box of a set made of milk glass panels supported by handsomely patterned black metal struts is gorgeously illuminated in jewel colors by lighting designer Marc McCullough. Gabriel Berry's multitudinous costumes are witty and colorful right down to his Rough Rider outfits for Jack's boys and a Miss Liberty rig for Annabelle.

Choreographer Victoria Morgan, who hails from the Cincinnati Ballet and the San Francisco Opera, is a talent to watch, judging by her fine work for this show. Getting her factory scene dancers to perform on a stage filled with tube-shaped glass vases without one being broken can keep an audience on tenterhooks.

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