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Cloclo : Chicago Folks Operetta at Chicago Center for the Performing Arts; Thu 16–Sat 18, Wed 22–Jul 25

Mia Clarke

Tue, 14 Jul 2009

Cloclo Moustache punches police officers, runs from the law and causes general havoc in the lives of her potential suitors—yet nothing can throw a cog in the daredevil exploits of this Folies Bergère dancer, Franz Lehár’s frivolous and foolhardy Parisian creation.


Cloclo, the last truly comic operetta by the Austrian composer of The Merry Widow, receives its U.S. premiere from the Chicago Folks Operetta, which features some of the area’s finest opera singers, musicians and dancers. A number of staff members from the Lyric Opera of Chicago—including the excellent choreographer and ballet mistress August Tye—have been drafted to pump up an imaginative and eloquent take on this 80-year-old slice of vaudevillian buffoonery. The new English translation fittingly focuses on big laughs as the small orchestra revives Lehár’s original score of jazz and tango rhythms, jostling alongside charming waltzes and his interpretations of common music-hall ditties of the 1920s.


Delve deeper into Lehár’s slapstick and pop in early to hear Michael Miller, one of the leading operetta scholars and president of the L.A.-based Operetta Foundation, giving pre-performance lectures on Thursday 16 and Friday 17. Since 2006, Gerald Frantzen and Alison Kelly, the husband-and-wife duo behind the CFO, have done a spectacular job of introducing 20th-century Viennese operettas to American audiences. They’re also savvy schedulers, taking a cue from Hollywood: Nothing goes down in summer like a romantic comedy.


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