The Merry Widow from Bluegum Creek. New book and lyrics by Frank Hatherley, from The Merry Widow, original libretto by Viktor Léon and Leo Stein. Music by Franz Lehar. Directed by Peter Smith. Musical direction by Jennifer Groom. Choreography by Belinda Hassall. Queanbeyan Players. The Queanbeyan Performing Arts Centre. November 4-5, 11-13, 17-19. Tickets $35-$45. 62856290 or the q.net.au.
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Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow first produced in 1905, can lay claim to being the most popular operetta of the 20th century, full of well known tunes. But, says Australian writer Frank Hatherley, the many translations of its original German libretto have never been entirely satisfactory, as he discovered in the early 2000s.
"I came out from England and was looking for something to do. My brother was directing a production of The Merry Widow at Rockdale Opera in Sydney."
Hatherley says The Merry Widow is the best thing the prolific Austro-Hungarian composer Lehar - who died in 1948 at the age of 78 - ever composed.
"It's absolutely gorgeous," he says, with numbers such as Vilja, Da geh' ich zu Maxim and the Merry Widow Waltz becoming very popular.
But something got lost in translation in the many English translations from the 1920s to the 1950s, British and American.
"All were just horrible in their way, Hatherley says, "I thought I could do better."
He hastens to add he's not referring to Lehar's music - which remains intact, along with the basic plot - only the dialogue and song lyrics. His brother asked him to create a new version and Hatherley came up with the idea of giving the story an Australian twist. In his version instead of it being centred around the Embassy of the fictional Pontevedro in Paris, it is set in the Australian Embassy in the French capital from the newly created Commonwealth which had only been in existence since 1901, four years after the operetta was set and first produced. And this Widow is, as the title indicates, from Bluegum Greek.
Hatherley effected another change on tradition with the title character.
"The Widow is usually played by an older woman," he says. Famous Widows have included Australian sopranos June Bronhill and Joan Sutherland. In Hatherley's version Mrs Anna Gladstone, played in Queanbeyan Players' production by Louise Keast, is unquestionably much younger.
"She's 29 - not 49 or 59," says Hatherley, who effected the change to make the story genuinely romantic. Anna turns up at the Australian embassy as the fabulously wealthy widow of a wool baron. Immediately interested in her is Vicomte Camille De Rosilla (Ken Goodge), though his intentions are entirely mercenary, and the Australian ambassador, Sir Zachariah Wentworth (Rob Grice), is determined that he not succeed in marrying her for the financial security of the new Commonwealth of Australia.
"That would mean the wool baron's money will go to the French - it's important that she marry an Australian."
And that, in fact, is what she intends to do. She's come in search of a love from her past, Danny Macquarie (Charles Hudson), who now works for the ambassador when not leading something of a playboy lifestyle. But can they rekindle the old flame?
Hatherley says his version - which incorporates elements like designing a new flag for the new country of Australia - has been endorsed by the Lehar estate and has been produced several times in Australia and Britain. He is coming from Sydney to Queanbeyan to see the new production.
"I'm bringing my daughter to see it - she's out from London for a holiday," he says. It will be his first visit to the Canberra region since 2000.
Hatherley was born in Brisbane in 1941 and grew up in Sydney, moving to Britain at the age of 23 where he lived for 34 years. In 1967 he won an ABC Trainee Director Scholarship and went to the Sheffield Playhouse where he staged many plays, later becoming associate director. In 1971 he joined BBC Television as a script editor and became a producer in the Plays department, including the BBC/ABC co-production The Emigrants, about an English family in Sydney. In 1978 he moved to Thames Television to produce the serial Rooms and in 1979 became a media studies lecturer in London.
He also worked as a playwright working on plays and musicals including an adaptation of Charles Dickens' Hard Times and Manly Mates, a 2003 political farce about NSW premier Robert Askin.
Hatherley says he has his own "merry widow"- style experience: he had a girlfriend as a young man but they broke up when he went overseas and married other people. When he came back, now single, he discovered she, too, was "now at a loose end" and they reunited and have been together ever since.
