The Operetta

Tuesdays, November 3–December 8, 1:30–3:30 p.m. (5 sessions) Course FEE: $125 General; $100 Skirball Members; $75 Full-Time Students Registration for this course begins online, on site, and by phone on Wednesday, August 12, at 12:00 p.m. Call it operetta, comic opera, light opera, or musical play—but for nearly 300 years, the most popular form of musical theater, gracing stages around the world, has been tuneful, light-hearted, and romantic.

Celebrating some of the most beautiful music ever written, this course will trace the history of the operetta from its beginnings in eighteenth-century London as an alternative to conventional opera; to the Paris of Napoleon III, where Jacques Offenbach brought the can-can from dance halls into the theater; to Vienna, where Johann Strauss and Franz Lehár created the delightful waltzes that swept the world; back to Victorian London, where the now-legendary pair of Gilbert and Sullivan stood the British upper class on its head with their fanciful, innovative works; and finally to America, where Victor Herbert, Rudolph Friml, Rodgers and Hammerstein, and Stephen Sondheim fashioned the music we sing to this day.

Instructor: Earl J. Schub is dean emeritus of Chicago College of Performing Arts at Roosevelt University. He served as director of marketing and executive producer for television at the Lyric Opera of Chicago and manager of Western Opera Theater. Schub holds an MBA in arts management from UCLA.