Performance History
The work was originally produced under the title Die gelbe Jacke (The Yellow Jacket). This was presented at the Theatre an der Wien, Vienna on 9 February 1923 with Hubert Marischka as Sou-Chong. It was not a great success, and Lehár later revised it, under the new title of Das Land des Lächelns, which was first performed, at the Metropol Theatre, Berlin, on 10 October 1929. Tauber reprised his role in London (1931 and 1932) South Africa (1939) and New York (1946), as well as in Vienna in 1930 (again at the Theatre an der Wien) and in 1938 (at the Vienna State Opera and also in Prague). Tauber also sang it in London and on tour throughout Britain between 1940 and 1942.
Sadler's Wells Opera produced it in London in the late 1950s, after the success of Lehár's The Merry Widow starring June Bronhill had rescued the company from bankruptcy. Starring Charles Craig, Elizabeth Fretwell and Bronhill, the show didn't attract the same audiences as The Merry Widow. However, Craig's singing on a recording is outstanding, with some top D♭ notes at the end of his big numbers.
Read more about this topic: The Land Of Smiles
Famous quotes containing the words performance and/or history:
“There are people who think that wrestling is an ignoble sport. Wrestling is not sport, it is a spectacle, and it is no more ignoble to attend a wrestled performance of suffering than a performance of the sorrows of Arnolphe or Andromaque.”
—Roland Barthes (1915–1980)
“No one is ahead of his time, it is only that the particular variety of creating his time is the one that his contemporaries who are also creating their own time refuse to accept.... For a very long time everybody refuses and then almost without a pause almost everybody accepts. In the history of the refused in the arts and literature the rapidity of the change is always startling.”
—Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)