Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #3635054 in Books
• Published on: 1933-02
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 68 pages

Customer Reviews

Recommended For Those Who Know The Music
Noel Coward (1899-1973) is today best recalled for the acid-etched hilarity of such comedies as HAY FEVER, PRIVATE LIVES, BLITHE SPIRIT and DESIGN FOR LIVING. But Coward was also a gifted composer and lyricist, and many of his creations graced the musical comedy reviews so popular in London and New York before World War II.

Coward's most ambitious venture into musical theatre, however, was BITTERSWEET, in which he essentially revived a type of sentimental operetta that had been a mainstay of European theatre in the late 1800s. Opening on the London stage in 1929, it received glowing reviews and ran a then-unheard-of 697 performances; the New York production, however, had the great misfortune to open shortly after the great 1929 stock market crash and a 1940 Nelson Eddy-Jeanette MacDonald film version was a notorious failure. As a result, neither play nor music has been widely known to American audiences.

The play tells the story of a young society girl of the 1800s who throws over a "good match" in order to elope with her music instructor--only to find that tragedy is the price of love. Unlike the plays for which he is so famous, BITTERSWEET offers little in the way of wickedly witty dialogue, but it does have some of the most wickedly witty lyrics you'll find this side of Cole Porter: the unexpectedly naughty "Ladies of the Town" and the truly unexpected "Green Carnation" were shockers in their day, and "If Love Were All" has become one of the great standards of 20th Century show music.

By and large, plays are intended to be seen, not read, and this may be particularly true of musicals, and it is certainly true of musicals where the music is unknown. While I do recommend the script for Coward fans who are already knowledgeable of the music, for all its strengths I find it difficult to believe that a casual reader could get much out of reading BITTERSWEET.

GFT, Amazon Reviewer
In memory of Cujo, 1992-2005
An Orange Cat and a Dear and Faithful Companion, Greatly Missed