Bitter Sweet
Encyclopedia
Bitter Sweet is an operetta
Operetta
Operetta is a genre of light opera, light in terms both of music and subject matter. It is also closely related, in English-language works, to forms of musical theatre.-Origins:...

 in three acts written by Noël Coward
Noël Coward
Sir Noël Peirce Coward was an English playwright, composer, director, actor and singer, known for his wit, flamboyance, and what Time magazine called "a sense of personal style, a combination of cheek and chic, pose and poise".Born in Teddington, a suburb of London, Coward attended a dance academy...

 and first produced in 1929 at Her Majesty's Theatre
Her Majesty's Theatre
Her Majesty's Theatre is a West End theatre, in Haymarket, City of Westminster, London. The present building was designed by Charles J. Phipps and was constructed in 1897 for actor-manager Herbert Beerbohm Tree, who established the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art at the theatre...

 in London. It ran for a very successful 967 performances.

The relatively simple plot - set in 19th century and early 20th century England
England
England is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. It shares land borders with Scotland to the north and Wales to the west; the Irish Sea is to the north west, the Celtic Sea to the south west, with the North Sea to the east and the English Channel to the south separating it from continental...

 and Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary
Austria-Hungary , more formally known as the Kingdoms and Lands Represented in the Imperial Council and the Lands of the Holy Hungarian Crown of Saint Stephen, was a constitutional monarchic union between the crowns of the Austrian Empire and the Kingdom of Hungary in...

, and concerning a young woman's elopement with her music teacher - is used as the hook for a series of light operatic numbers, many with complex melodies strongly reminiscent of Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the librettist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan . The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S...

. Of the songs in the show, the best known by far is "I'll See You Again
I'll See You Again
"I'll See You Again" is a song by the English songwriter Sir Noel Coward.It originated in Coward's 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet, however soon emerged as a standard in its own right and became one of Coward's best known compositions...

", used as a recurring motif throughout the play. Another popular song is "If Love Were All
If Love Were All
"If Love Were All" is a song by Noël Coward, published in 1929 and written for the operetta Bitter Sweet. The song is considered autobiographical, and has been described as "self-deprecating" as well as "one of the loneliest pop songs ever written".Ivy St...

". Short on memorable Cowardian dialogue, Bitter Sweet nonetheless stands out as containing some of Coward's best music and has always been popular in revivals around the world, a number of which have been recorded on CD. It was filmed twice, in 1933
Bitter Sweet (1933 film)
Bitter Sweet is a musical romance film directed by Herbert Wilcox and released by United Artists in 1933. It was the first film adaptation of Noel Coward's 1929 operetta Bitter Sweet. It starred Anna Neagle and Fernand Gravey, with Ivy St. Helier reviving her stage role as Manon.It tells the story...

 in black-and-white (in Britain, with Anna Neagle
Anna Neagle
Forming a professional alliance with Wilcox, Neagle played her first starring film role in the musical Goodnight Vienna , again with Jack Buchanan. With this film Neagle became an overnight favourite...

 and Fernand Gravet in the leading roles) and in 1940
Bitter Sweet (1940 film)
Bitter Sweet is a 1940 Technicolor American musical film directed by W. S. Van Dyke, based on the operetta by Noel Coward and previously filmed in 1933; see Bitter Sweet . It was nominated for two Academy Awards, one for Best Cinematography and the other for Best Art Direction by Cedric Gibbons and...

 in Technicolor
Technicolor
Technicolor is a color motion picture process invented in 1916 and improved over several decades.It was the second major process, after Britain's Kinemacolor, and the most widely used color process in Hollywood from 1922 to 1952...

 by MGM
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer
Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer Inc. is an American media company, involved primarily in the production and distribution of films and television programs. MGM was founded in 1924 when the entertainment entrepreneur Marcus Loew gained control of Metro Pictures, Goldwyn Pictures Corporation and Louis B. Mayer...

, starring Jeanette MacDonald
Jeanette MacDonald
Jeanette MacDonald was an American singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier and Nelson Eddy...

 and Nelson Eddy
Nelson Eddy
Nelson Ackerman Eddy was an American singer and actor who appeared in 19 musical films during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as in opera and on the concert stage, radio, television, and in nightclubs. A classically trained baritone, he is best remembered for the eight films in which he costarred...

. Coward disliked the 1940 film.

Plot

In a flashback, the aged Marchioness of Shayne is seen as the young Sarah Millick, having a singing lesson with Carl Linden. The action passes from London to Vienna, where Carl is fatally wounded in a duel, and back to London, where Sarah (now known as Sari), having become world-famous as an interpreter of Carl's songs, somewhat reluctantly accepts a marriage proposal from the Marquis of Shayne. Finally, the action is back to the Jazz Age
Jazz Age
The Jazz Age was a movement that took place during the 1920s or the Roaring Twenties from which jazz music and dance emerged. The movement came about with the introduction of mainstream radio and the end of the war. This era ended in the 1930s with the beginning of The Great Depression but has...

 where it was at the start of the show, and Sarah, who has never stopped loving Carl, sings sadly, "I shall love you till I die - good bye."

Productions

Although popular with amateur operatic societies, Bitter Sweet has had relatively few professional productions. The original production in 1929 at Her Majesty's Theatre in London starred Peggy Wood
Peggy Wood
Peggy Wood was an American actress of stage, film and television.-Early career:She was born Mary Margaret Wood in Brooklyn, New York, the daughter of Eugene Wood, a journalist, and Mary Gardner, a telegraph operator. She was a direct descendant of Daniel Boone...

 as Sarah, with Georges Metaxa as Carl. Evelyn Laye
Evelyn Laye
Evelyn Laye, CBE was an English theatre and film actress.-Early years and career:Born as Elsie Evelyn Lay in Bloomsbury, London, Laye made her first stage appearance in August 1915 at the Theatre Royal, Brighton as Nang-Ping in Mr...

 had been the first choice to play Sarah, but turned it down as she was annoyed with the producer, C.B. Cochran, who she felt had caused her marriage to actor Sonnie Hale to fail by putting him in a show opposite Jessie Matthews
Jessie Matthews
Jessie Matthews, OBE was an English actress, dancer and singer of the 1930s, whose career continued into the post-war period.-Early life:...

, with whom he had an affair. Laye later played the part on Broadway
Broadway theatre
Broadway theatre, commonly called simply Broadway, refers to theatrical performances presented in one of the 40 professional theatres with 500 or more seats located in the Theatre District centered along Broadway, and in Lincoln Center, in Manhattan in New York City...

 (1929). The role of the aged Marquis of Shayne was played by the 26 year-old Alan Napier
Alan Napier
Alan William Napier-Clavering was an English actor, best known for portraying Alfred Pennyworth in the 1960s live-action Batman television series.-Early life and career:...

, later to gain fame as Batman's butler, Alfred, in the 1960s. A brief Broadway revival played in 1934.

A revival at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter
Exeter
Exeter is a historic city in Devon, England. It lies within the ceremonial county of Devon, of which it is the county town as well as the home of Devon County Council. Currently the administrative area has the status of a non-metropolitan district, and is therefore under the administration of the...

 in the early 1980s with Jan Hartley-Morris as Sarah led to a large-scale revival in London which also toured the provinces in 1988. This New Sadler's Wells Opera production by Ian Judge used a revised orchestration by Michael Reed
Michael Reed
Michael Reed BSC is a British cinematographer who worked on several notable films in the 1960s and 1970s, including Dracula: Prince of Darkness and Shout at the Devil...

, and was recorded complete (although without dialogue) by TER (That's Entertainment Records). On stage, Valerie Masterson
Valerie Masterson
Margaret Valerie Masterson , is a retired English opera singer, a lecturer and Vice-President of British Youth Opera. After study in Italy, she began to sing opera in Europe...

 and Ann Mackay alternated in the major leading part of Sarah, with Martin Smith
Martin Smith (actor/musician)
Martin Smith was a British actor, singer, and composer who starred in many shows in London's West End...

 as Carl and Rosemary Ashe as Manon. Valerie Masterson was chosen to record the role.

The St. Louis Municipal Opera
The Muny
The Muny, short for The Municipal Theatre Association of St. Louis, is an outdoor musical theatre, located in Forest Park, St. Louis, Missouri...

 ("the Muny") presented numerous productions of Bitter Sweet between 1933 and 1953 as well as one in 1974. The Long Beach Civic Light Opera in Southern California
Southern California
Southern California is a megaregion, or megapolitan area, in the southern area of the U.S. state of California. Large urban areas include Greater Los Angeles and Greater San Diego. The urban area stretches along the coast from Ventura through the Southland and Inland Empire to San Diego...

 staged a celebrated production of Bitter Sweet in 1983 starring Shirley Jones
Shirley Jones
Shirley Mae Jones is an American singer and actress of stage, film and television. In her six decades of television, she starred as wholesome characters in a number of well-known musical films, such as Oklahoma! , Carousel , and The Music Man...

 as Sarah/Sari/Marchioness, and the Ohio Light Opera
Ohio Light Opera
The Ohio Light Opera is a professional opera company based in Wooster, Ohio that performs the light opera repertory, including Gilbert and Sullivan, American, British and continental operettas, and other musical theatre works, especially of the late 19th and early 20th centuries...

 produced Bitter Sweet in 1993 and 1998, both times starring Julie Wright as Sarah/Sari/Marchioness. The San Francisco-based professional Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan
Gilbert and Sullivan refers to the Victorian-era theatrical partnership of the librettist W. S. Gilbert and the composer Arthur Sullivan . The two men collaborated on fourteen comic operas between 1871 and 1896, of which H.M.S...

 company, the Lamplighters, gives its first production of Bitter Sweet in April 2009.

Analysis

It has been suggested that the operetta has an early use of the word "gay
Gay
Gay is a word that refers to a homosexual person, especially a homosexual male. For homosexual women the specific term is "lesbian"....

" to mean "homosexual", in the song "Green Carnation" where four overdressed, 1890s dandies sing:
Pretty boys, witty boys, You may sneer
At our disintegration.
Haughty boys, naughty boys,
Dear, dear, dear!
Swooning with affectation...
And as we are the reason
For the "Nineties" being gay,
We all wear a green carnation.


The suggestion is that Coward uses the "gay nineties" as a double entendre
Double entendre
A double entendre or adianoeta is a figure of speech in which a spoken phrase is devised to be understood in either of two ways. Often the first meaning is straightforward, while the second meaning is less so: often risqué or ironic....

. The song title alludes to the gay playwright Oscar Wilde
Oscar Wilde
Oscar Fingal O'Flahertie Wills Wilde was an Irish writer and poet. After writing in different forms throughout the 1880s, he became one of London's most popular playwrights in the early 1890s...

, who famously wore a green carnation himself. (The first use of the word "gay" in this sense recorded by the Oxford English Dictionary
Oxford English Dictionary
The Oxford English Dictionary , published by the Oxford University Press, is the self-styled premier dictionary of the English language. Two fully bound print editions of the OED have been published under its current name, in 1928 and 1989. The first edition was published in twelve volumes , and...

 is in a novel published in America in 1951, but earlier instances have been found.)

It has also been suggested that when MGM made the 1937 film Maytime, they unofficially used the basic storyline of Bitter Sweet, rather than using the plot of the stage Maytime. The film of Maytime has an aged Jeanette MacDonald
Jeanette MacDonald
Jeanette MacDonald was an American singer and actress best remembered for her musical films of the 1930s with Maurice Chevalier and Nelson Eddy...

 living under a phony name, and recalling how, as a young opera singer, she fell in love with a young baritone
Baritone
Baritone is a type of male singing voice that lies between the bass and tenor voices. It is the most common male voice. Originally from the Greek , meaning deep sounding, music for this voice is typically written in the range from the second F below middle C to the F above middle C Baritone (or...

 (Nelson Eddy
Nelson Eddy
Nelson Ackerman Eddy was an American singer and actor who appeared in 19 musical films during the 1930s and 1940s, as well as in opera and on the concert stage, radio, television, and in nightclubs. A classically trained baritone, he is best remembered for the eight films in which he costarred...

), who was eventually murdered by MacDonald's jealous music teacher (played by John Barrymore
John Barrymore
John Sidney Blyth , better known as John Barrymore, was an acclaimed American actor. He first gained fame as a handsome stage actor in light comedy, then high drama and culminating in groundbreaking portrayals in Shakespearean plays Hamlet and Richard III...

), whom MacDonald had felt obligated to marry. As a result of this film, when MGM remade Bitter Sweet with MacDonald and Eddy, they kept most of the original plot, but dropped the framing device in which the Marchioness appears.

Musical numbers

Act I
  • That Wonderful Melody – Singer and Dancing Chorus
  • The Call of Life – The Marchioness of Shayne and Chorus
  • If You Could Only Come with Me – Carl Linden
  • I’ll See You Again – Sarah Millick and Carl
  • Polka
  • Tell Me What is Love? – Sarah and Chorus
  • The Last Dance – The Marquis of Steere, Lord Edgar James, Lord Sorrel, Mr. Vale, Mr. Bethel, Mr. Proutie, Victoria, Harriet, Gloria, Honor, Jane and Effie

Act II
  • Life in the Morning – Waiters and Cleaners
  • Ladies of the Town – Lotte, Freda, Hansi and Gussie
  • If Love Were All
    If Love Were All
    "If Love Were All" is a song by Noël Coward, published in 1929 and written for the operetta Bitter Sweet. The song is considered autobiographical, and has been described as "self-deprecating" as well as "one of the loneliest pop songs ever written".Ivy St...

     – Manon
  • Evermore and a Day – Sari Linden
  • Dear Little Café – Sari and Carl
  • Bitter Sweet Waltz
  • We Wish to Order Wine –
  • Tokay – Carl, Officers and Chorus
  • Bonne Nuit, Merci – Manon
  • Kiss me – Manon and Chorus

Act III
  • Tara-ra—boom-de-ay (by Henry J. Sayers) – Mr. Bethel and Mrs., Mr. and Mrs. Vale, Mr. and Mrs. Proutie, The Duke and Duchess of Tenterton, Lord and Lady Sorrel, Lord and Lady James, Lady Sorrel
  • Alas! The Time is Past – The Duchess of Tenterton, Lady James, Mrs. Proutie, Lady Sorrel, Mrs. Vale and Mrs. Bethel
  • We All Wear A Green Carnation – Bertram Sellick, Lord Henry Jade, Vernon Craft and Cedrick Ballantyne
  • Zigeuner – Sari


The Noël Coward Society's website, drawing on performing statistics from the publishers and the Performing Right Society, ranks "I'll See You Again" and "If Love Were All
If Love Were All
"If Love Were All" is a song by Noël Coward, published in 1929 and written for the operetta Bitter Sweet. The song is considered autobiographical, and has been described as "self-deprecating" as well as "one of the loneliest pop songs ever written".Ivy St...

" as among Coward's ten most popular songs. "Dear Little Café" is among the top twenty.

External links

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