Roberta

Product Description Roberta, a musical comedy by Jerome Kern and Otto Harbach, which opened at New York's New Amsterdam Theatre in November 1933, was intended to follow a similar structure of his two previous musicals, The Cat And The Fiddle (1931) and Music In The Air (1932). These musicals were chic, sophisticated tapestries of dialogue, song, and dance interwoven with nearly continuous underscoring. Based on Alice Duer Miller's novel, Gowns By Roberta, the musical is a romantic coming-of-age comedy about a young American's growth from naïve college athlete to sophisticated owner of his Great-aunt Minnie's Parisian fashion house. Like The Cat and The Fiddle, which had been set in Brussels, Roberta presents a comedic clash between Old World Europe and brash New World America Likewise, the wonderful Kern score contrasts such haunting songs as "The Touch Of your Hand" and "Smoke Gets In Your Eyes" with the brassy "I'll Be Hard to Handle" and "Let's Begin." Conducted by Rob Berman, one of Broadway's finest musical directors, the cast includes West End, Broadway, and opera stars Kim Criswell, Annalene Beechey, Jason Graae, and Diana Montague. There have been previous recordings of the songs from Roberta, but this is the first recording of the complete score in its original orchestrations by Kern's orchestrator-of-choice, Robert Russell Bennett. Review "Now, thanks to [their] heroic efforts, we have a two-CD reconstruction that is the closest we are ever likely to get to hearing Roberta in its original form. Years of painstaking work by a team of musicologists and musical-theater historians have restored this gem of a score to us, and it's presented here by a top-notch group of performers." --Opera News"Roberta remains one of Broadway's most famous '30s titles; [it] yielded a standard (Smoke Gets in Your Eyes), a Fred-and-Ginger movie, a remake, and seven studio cast albums. Now we have an eighth -- easily the best of them all." --Peter Filichia"I must commend New World Records for the thoroughness of its research, the quality of the booklet notes, and the overall excellence of their product." --Fanfare