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Knickerbocker Holiday

• By Kurt Weill and Maxwell Anderson
• Operetta Theatre, Jane Mallett Theatre
• In Toronto on Friday night

Knickerbocker Holiday, by Kurt Weill (music) and Maxwell Anderson (book and lyrics) sends up the high stupidity, low cunning and deep, brazen corruption of government in the early American Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (which later became New York).

It opened Friday night at Jane Mallett Theatre, and with all its creaks and groans it provided a refreshing change from the staple middle European and Victorian-English operetta repertoire.

The piece has not until now had a production in Canada, in spite of being a huge hit at its 1938 premiere on Broadway (running for 168 performances) when it was directed by Joshua Logan and starred Walter Huston as the fascistic governor Stuyvesant.

The long delay in our having it here seems peculiar if not positively inhospitable. Perhaps Canadian trepidatious self-censorship was activated by its then-daring lampooning of political double-dealing and hypocrisy. But today, when such matters are too commonplace to even be noted, Knickerbocker Holiday can parade itself with impunity as a trenchant and moral entertainment, in Toronto-the-no-longer-so-good, as part of the Toronto Operetta Theatre's current season.

Anderson was a major playwright of his period and his lyrics provided Weill with several good songs and one great one (the touching September Song, which almost wins you over to the suit of the geriatric, black-hearted Governor Stuyvesant who sings it to the lovely and reluctant young Tina in his attempt to persuade her to marry him.) Weill's music falls off, rather, in the second half, despite the reprise of one of the good numbers, There's Nowhere to Go But U p, sung this time by Washington Irving, the early 19th-century author of the story on which Anderson based his book, and who is given his own role in the piece as an interventionist, omniscient narrator.

Bass-baritone Curtis Sullivan sang the Washington Irving role with a good deal of aplomb though I'd have liked his vocalism to be a bit more subservient to a chatty parlando style, in keeping with his storytelling function.

The excellent young baritone Dale Miller sang the role of Brom Broeck, the romantic hero of the piece, Tina's true love, "the first American" (that is, a young man with a stubborn mind of his own and a powerful unwillingness to be bamboozled or bullied). Miller shone particularly, along with the lovely light soprano Amy Wallis as Tina, in the tender duet It Never Was You, and with tenor Justin Ralph as Brom's friend Tenpin in the duet-with-ensemble There's Nowhere to Go But Up.

My heart bled a little for Miller when he had to change his first costume and don large, dreadful yellow buckled shoes, an oppressive wig and a centre-of-gravity-lowering jerkin. He was a fine figure in the basic black of early Act One. The clunky "period" costume cut him in half and weighed him down.

The production's most effective and articulate performer (mind you his character has all the jam) was baritone David Ludwig in a tour- de-force as the villainous Governor Stuyvesant. Ludwig is a seasoned and subtle actor, and his September Song, while hardly bel canto, was everything it ought to have been. His duet The One Indispensable Man, with Ford Roberts as Councillor Tienhoven, was another high point.

I also enjoyed Keith Lam as the clear-voiced town crier, baritone Réjean Cournoyer as the imposing Roosevelt, "a councillor with a conscience," soprano Alexandra LeBlanc as Mistress Schermerhorn, "a moralist," and the rather stolid Ford Roberts as Tienhoven, Tina's pompous and very crooked father, Councillor of New Amsterdam.

Weill was no Mahler, but his characteristic thin, spiny orchestra needed — as an old colleague suggested — to "slouch" a bit more than conductor David Speers was able to make it do. So did Michael Rose's sweet-voiced, nicely schooled chorus. Guillermo Silva-Marin's stage direction was practical, forthright and unaffected, not particularly suave or stylish, but it got the piece across.

If you had to miss it, that's too bad, in case it isn't revived again for another 70 years. With luck, though, a major opera house (COC? The Met?) will take it on sooner.

Special to the Globe and Mail