Bitter Sweet

Show Description:

He was a Las Vegas headliner … a prolific playwright and lyricist … a film, stage, and television actor, producer, and director … a singer and raconteur … AND a composer who, with his 1929 London stage work Bitter Sweet, brought home-grown romantic operetta back to the British stage. If ever 20th-century arts produced a true Renaissance man, it was Noël Coward.  Inspired by a recording of Die Fledermaus and written in part while he was starring on Broadway in his revue This Year of Grace, Bitter Sweet begins in 1929 as Lady Shayne—throwing a party for a young woman who prefers a poor musician to her fiancé—recalls her own youth.  The action flashes back to 1875 and a wealthy engaged English debutante, Sarah Millick, who falls hard for her dashing music teacher Carl Linden and elopes with him to Vienna.  She finds there not the rosy life she anticipated but, among other things, Carl’s former lover Manon and a romantically aggressive army captain who raises Carl’s ire.  Coward sprinkled his score with a non-stop mix of romantic, comical, and satirical tunes, including Sarah and Carl’s ever-popular duet “I’ll See You Again,” (conceived in a taxi while Coward was stuck in a New York traffic jam), the mock-aesthetic male quartet “Green Carnation,” and Manon’s “If Love Were All.”