The trouble with New Jersey politics is that it's almost impossible to follow without a libretto.
In 2012, for instance, a new production of the Tagalog sarswela Walang sugat (1902; "Without Wounds," libretto by Severino Reyes, music by Fulgencio Tolentino) was staged in Manila.
"I find it hard to speak without a libretto," he confesses, showing how easily he can play Cassio to Manur's Otello, but also how vulnerable he is to the insidious promptings of Natalia's Iago-like companion, Dato.
Ultimately, Kirstein had to choose between this liberating kind of work, which involved him in every creative aspect of production, and the job of chasing funds for the man who, on his return to ballet, in 1941, rapidly choreographed — without any libretto, to music by Tchaikovsky and Bach, and ceding no authority whatever — "Ballet Imperial" and "Concerto Barocco".
These no-frills albums, without printed librettos, are a reminder of the days when major companies maintained budget labels.
As dramatised in the film Topsy-Turvy, the author and composer were at an impasse until 8 May 1884, when Gilbert dropped the lozenge idea and agreed to provide a libretto without any supernatural elements.
"The translator," Mrs. Martin wrote in The Times in 1948, "derives a great degree of satisfaction from helping to present an opera to American audiences in the way both the composer and his librettist intended, namely, as a drama set to music, which may be enjoyed without reference to the libretto in intermissions".
Nikolai Volkov's libretto is mystifying without the program notes, which should not be needed to make sense of art.
Soap operas are television (originally radio) dramas that play like bad librettos without music.
The libretto tries to improve the screenplay; without making an intensive comparison, it seems like the two love triangles (with the Astaire character trying to steal successive girlfriend/stage partners from Bing) have been toned down; certainly Lila (Megan Sikora), the first of the girlfriends, doesn't seem to have any romantic link to either Fred Corbin Bleuu) or Bing Bryce Pinkhamm).
