I was going to Wooster Ohio for both the Operetta Festival as well as for some material on Ohio German among the Mennonites / Amish for one of my classes.

Leaving at 5 am I missed most of the commuter traffic, up 270 through Maryland, out I-48 through western Maryland [past Noah's Ark which is being built just west of Frostburg] and West Virginia, north to Pennsylvania, west through Wheeling into Ohio.  At Wheeling the land drops dramatically down to the Ohio and the city is squeezed in tight between mountains and the river. Very little truck traffic until Ohio and generally pleasant  driving through the mountains which run almost non stop from Hagerstown until crossing the Ohio River at Wheeling; then hilly land near the river and finally rolling land in northern Ohio. I got to the motel after 425 miles.

I was staying at the Hilton Garden Inn about 1½ mile outside Wooster and about a 7 minute drive from the theater I was going to be attending.   It had free wireless internet, large cold rooms, and I'd recommend it.

Before I went, all I knew about Wooster was Rubbermaid. Wooster is a compact city of 25,000 to 28,000, almost all residential; it's about an hour south of Cleveland and an hour and a half east of Columbus. The older houses from the 19th and early 20th centuries are large bungalow types, the newer ones ranch houses. Except in the very middle of the city there's an open feeling to the residential streets without them feeling suburban and isolated. The layout and style are something like north Asheville but with far more trees and tree lined streets and with a more open feeling. The city ends very abruptly except for a stretch along the Lincoln Highway, Highway 30, which is the commercial slurb. 

The city has two focal points, the town square ["Public Square"] and the college. [The other college Ohio State University Agricultural  is on the outskirts near where my motel was.]

The square [Liberty and Market Streets] is something like the squares in smaller Pennsylvania cities like Chambersburg but somewhat larger and with extra nooks and crannies. It's towered over by a court house that's impressive and which looks completely out of place. It's from the 1870s with the lower floors looking like Prussian Gründerzeit style, including huge male caryatids and atlases  flanking the doors, and the upper floors in French Second Empire style. The 60? 80? foot tower can be seen from the edge of the city.

Like almost every medium and small American city, all commercial life has been sucked out of it by the malls and strips outside the city limits. Downtown Wooster doesn't look shabby or dangerous in the least but has little commercial activity. What had been the commercial center looks like it ran about 4 blocks in one direction and about 6 blocks in the other. There are now two book stores, one used, one general; a Rubbermaid outlet store [where I didn't see any dramatic bargains]; Freedlander's Department Store a small local department store [same name as the name of the theater where the operettas are given]; two coffee houses, one of which closes at 6pm, one at 1 am; two upscale restaurants and 2 downscale restaurants.

There are two especially bright spots downtown: about 2 blocks from the square is Buehler's, a local supermarket. That doesn't sound impressive until you know that it is [1.] a very large semi-luxury store with prepared foods and sushi and take out dinners, parallel to what you find in the wealthier DC suburbs but here plunked down right in the middle of the city; [2.] It has a large attached cafe and restaurant. The restaurant is not elegant but it is cheerful, large and comfortable, dinner prices in the $9 range and looks like it might also serve tour groups as well as the locals.

The other sign of a possible commercial renaissance is Tulipan Hungarian Pastry & Coffee Shop, a Hungarian cafe-conditorei. It's very attractive inside with marble topped tables and Mitteleuropäisch cafe bentwood chairs. Tea and coffee are served with the right utensils of good quality; the silverware and plates and the presentation of the food are professional, caring, sophisticated. Two thirds of what they offer is Torten and pastries and 1/3 is open faced Hungarian sandwiches. I had a Hungarian cheese sandwich, a slice of dobos torte and a pot of black tea, all served and presented on simple but elegant white chinaware. [Unfortunately the cafe has no website.]

In talking to the owner I learned that she's been open about a year and that she agreed with me that presentation of food makes a big difference in how it tastes. I mentioned that it would be nice if the cafe were open after the operettas so people would have some where to go after the shows. She said that downtown is basically deserted after 6pm so it's not economically worthwhile to stay open. She had been considering re-opening the cafe for a few hours after the plays next year. We talked a little about The Soldier's Promise which she had also seen and then a man joined in who had previously been in conversation with the owner.

He [as she] was Hungarian but one who had emigrated to Australia and who was here in the US for a musical tour and Wooster was one of his stops. It was good to hear two people agreeing with my opinion of the operetta.

The campus of the College of Wooster is about ¾ mile from the main square and runs about a half mile in each direction. It's architecture is nice but not spectacular. But what is unusually good is how they handled new buildings on campus. Many American college campuses have a beautiful original section which is surrounded by cheap looking new buildings that are out of scale and out of style with the original buildings. The University of Virginia is an a really bad example of this. Wooster's new buildings, however, are in the correct scale and in matching or same materials as the original buildings and the whole is a unified composition. This building from the 1920s was expanded, probably in the 1990s, but they did it harmoniously. The theater where the operetta festival takes place is on the college campus.

To the south of Wooster is the area where the Amish and Mennonites settled [the Amish group is supposed to be the largest in the United States], coming mostly from Pennsylvania - some came directly from Europe - as well as where the Swiss went. The shows were matinees and evening presentations so I used the mornings for driving around the rural area.

The land is rolling; two lane highways which you share with horse drawn buggies and double bottom tractor trailers. Traffic is generally light. The area is agricultural but seems to be more like the truck gardens of New Jersey [although on a far bigger scale] than like the wheat regions out west.

Most of the stores/businesses were attachments to farms. You drive down a side road, see a sign for a food store, boot store, dairy, furniture store, etc. drive a half or quarter mile down a side road to the business which was almost always part of a farm. There were equivalents to 7-11s but for Mennonites, as well as boot stores and cowboy stores which first surprised me until I made the connection to horses, harnesses, buggies, etc. You were directed to all these places by bright hand-painted signs that were common throughout the area and used for commercial as well as small farm businesses.

I had kept seeing signs advertising "non-electric Amish wares" and I was wondering if besides the divisions into Mennonite and Amish there was a subdivision between "Amish" and "non-electric Amish". It turned out the signs meant "goods not operated by electricity so the Amish can use them".

Quite a few times I could listen in on conversations in Pennsylvania German [although I guess here it's Ohio German]; since everything I was eavesdropping on was practical and plain and very short [where's the hammer? tell your sister to hurry up] it was fairly easy to understand. I was surprised that the dialects still had the pure European vowels after 250 years in America and not our sloppy American vowels. What was different from German, however, was the Tonfall or melody; it didn't sound like [High] German rhythm and melody.

Most people - old, middle aged, children - seemed to use grammar fairly close to today's German [but since I was only hearing short conversational phrases, they didn't have too many opportunities to go off from the standard]; the one exception was teenagers speaking among themselves who had sloppy and messy German and mixed it up with a lot of English. When they spoke to their parents or older people their German was more like everyone else's.

In the "farm stores" the people I dealt with were mostly women; whether young or old they were slim and pale and all struck me as looking like [non-Irish] nuns. The relatively few men I had dealings with were fairly tall, big boned, barrel-chested but not fat. [In fact, not only among the Mennonites/Amish but among all the people I encountered in the Wooster area, there were almost none of the morbidly obese people you always encounter when travelling in the South.] The other thing that struck me about the males, especially the younger ones was that they were naive, innocent, bluff and - because of my own prejudices, no doubt - kind of dopey; they also had very square heads, pale skin and light eyes.

In the first furniture store I went into, just to browse, I saw a kitchen table set and a CD cabinet that I would have bought on the spot if the spot were in Virginia and not Ohio, 425 miles from home and with no practical way of getting it back. It was interesting that I also saw what was called a German kitchen brunch Ecke which I had wanted when I lived in my house - it can't fit into my apartment - and which was particularly fancy but cost about $1,200, maybe half the cost of what I see them advertised for here.

The buggies were being driven on the shoulders of the [mostly two lane] roads and so didn't impede traffic. The only time there were problems were a very few occasions in Wooster on the city streets where there is no shoulder and no way of passing; so back ups of several block lengths resulted. There were many Mennonite bicyclists on two wheelers and on three wheelers that can carry packages; I was wondering why the Mennonites/Amish in Pennsylvania don't use bicycles instead of horses. Many times the drivers of the buggies seemed to be sprawled sideways on the seat when there were no passengers.

The buggies are drawn by the same kind of horses that run at the trotting race tracks, and which always look silly rather than graceful to me since their legs seem to be going out sprawling in strange directions. When you see the horses' legs from the back or the front, the bulk of the square buggy shape make the awkward leg movements appear even odder.  Once or twice there weren't horse and buggies but rather larger wagons pulled by draft horses, like the Budweiser Clydesdales or percherons , that  I had seen being used in the fields to pull farm equipment, but here on the road they were moving really fast, not only faster than they moved in the fields but faster than the horse and buggies.

I stopped in Trail, just outside Winesburg, at the Troyer's Country Store  to have a baloney sandwich I didn't particularly want since I wasn't hungry. But Troyer's Trail Bologna is a food specialty of the area. It was like a very robust German baloney.

But the next stop, after this local color baloney cafe was a semi-shock. When I used to go to the Pennsylvania Dutch country I found things far more commercialized than here. It wasn't until the third day in Ohio  that I encountered the other side of the Amish-Mennonite area. I had noticed reference to tour groups and busses but hadn't seen any. But on Saturday when I was driving down to the Swiss settlement, I kept meeting busses and passing big resorts like Der Dutchman's [a chain] or The Amish Door or Dutch Valley Inn that combined large restaurants, bakeries, motels and souvenir shops into one complex.

They had [probably genuine] rent-an Amish at their front entrances selling vegetables for local color. These stores had prices 60-80% higher than the local businesses I had seen up to then [apple butter jumped from $1.50 at a farm store to $1.75 at the Amish equivalent of a 7-11 to $4.50 at two of these commercialized complexes.] I went into two of these places but was really upset by the overwhelming huge volume of kitsch and by the smell of pot pourri .

These were the kinds of commercial things I've experienced in the Pennsylvania German country; maybe there are just as many 'normal" Amish and Amish businesses in Pennsylvania as in Ohio, but I haven't seen them in Pennsylvania.

Also on Saturday morning there was a really odd incident, when I was leaving a food store. There was a traffic jam involving a horse drawn carriage with a family where the horse was rearing up and couldn't be backed up so he blocked a [non-licensed] John Deere riding tractor which a woman was using for shopping [later I saw her driving down the highway on it] which in turn caused a blockage to an SUV that was coming in an at angle. It took a few minutes to get everything straightened out.

In the newspapers I kept seeing unbelievably low-priced houses, such as a 5 bedroom 3 bath house for $55,000; after a while I realized that the reason for the low prices as that you had to already have your own land to build the house on. In this area with so much open farm land that probably is pretty common. The houses were especially neat and especially well kept and many of them were built of brick in sophisticated Flemish bond patterns.

I was going to four operettas [three German ones and one American one that was a rewrite of a German one] that the Ohio Light Opera Company was presenting: one operetta you see over and over again [Fledermaus]; two which are never performed in the US [Im Weißen Rößl and The Soldier's Promise / Der gute Kamerad] and one that probably hasn't been done professionally since WWII [May Time].

All the shows were in the Friedlander Theater on the Wooster College campus. The theater holds about 400 on one level; the decorations aren't ornate or traditional but the atmosphere of the house is warm. There are good acoustics [no miking for these performances] and I was sitting at many different locations throughout the theater from front to back from left to right. If I go back though, I'd try to get seats around Row G, since back in the last three rows you can't see the expressions on the singers' faces. Very often, though, the auditorium on verge of being too warm.


The orchestra pit rises for playing the overtures and then descends for the actual performance. [When the pit is up the musicians - around 30 in number - are in formal dress; but when you look down into the pit after it's descended, they strip down to white shirts].

The performers are mainly graduate music students in their late 20s. The singing was always good, sometimes outstanding. They tend to be adequate in acting and there is very little dancing, either because of the size of the stage or maybe the performers aren't skilled in dancing. Although it holds together only during the summer, the company is a repertory company, so singers who are leads in one show are in supporting roles in other shows. There are, however, a few exceptions, usually the ones with the best voices, who only performed lead roles. For some of the more strenuous roles like Rosalinde in Fledermaus there were two singers who alternated performances.

The sets and production are imaginative, appropriate and first quality. Although I disagreed at times with the period costumes that were used for some of the shows, the costumes were also professional and slick. As is getting to be the case on Broadway every show got an automatic standing ovations, deserved or not, but at least  the  curtain calls were kept short.

In Fledermaus Rosalinde was outstanding both as an actress and a singer; Eisenstein sang well but acted like a confused television father; Adele wasn't the Viennese soubrette she's usually played as but was good; when Prince Orlovsky came on,  I though it was going to be a disappointment because the Russian accent and bored demeanor were so overdone; but the actress turned out well [the production also downplayed the lesbian frisson that you usually see with Orlovsky/Adele/Ida; maybe it was too much for mid America]. Since I don't know music I'm guessing, but I think the music in Fledermaus was probably the most difficult to play of all the shows. The overture was done well but lacked the sparkle and pfiff that you hear on recordings with large philharmonic orchestras.

The set for the first act, Eisenstein's house, was the best, realistic in style with two or three large Klimt-like paintings dominating the room; the ballroom in the second act was good but not as impressive and in the third act the jail office and jail cells were collapsed into one scene -- and they cut the corny Frosch comedy down drastically.

Between the matinee and evening shows I had supper at the Wooster Inn. It's a small hotel and restaurant connected to the college and on the edge of the campus. Because it was so hot [87 degrees - while it was 98 in Washington] I had a large salad and a fruit bowl for dessert.

It was a pleasant setting, very good atmosphere and slick service. The restaurant overlooks the college golf course and I was in the garden room which had a 180 degree view. There was happy hour with a live combo including unusual short conga drums playing outside.

The menu had a sharp break with about half the meals being basically around $10 but the other side of the menu was almost twice as expensive and with appetizers, such as a lavish shrimp cocktail at $8.95. It's a lovely inn that I can recommend.

Im weißen Rößl / The White Horse Inn is more a musical comedy than an operetta; when it first came out it was a big hit not only in Berlin and Vienna but also in London and New York because it was presented as a spectacle with live animals, a cast of hundreds, spectacular effects. I don't think the show has been done in the US since the 1930s. I've seen it once, over 40 years ago in Graz, where it was done as a normal sized show at the opera house.

The plot is set at the White Horse Inn in the Salzkammergut in the summer tourist season and has a triple boy gets girl plot with part of the tension being between a Prussian vacationer from Berlin and another vacationer from Vienna. Most people know some of the melodies but probably not the names of the songs such as Im Weißen Rößl and Mein Liebeslied muß ein Walzer sein and Die ganze Welt ist Himmelblau  and Zuschau'n kann i' nit  and Es muß was Wunderbares sein [von dir geliebt zu werden] .

Some touches of the production were really odd: one of the characters physically touched the Emperor [and of course you could ask what was Franz Josef, who died in 1916 and whose empire ended in 1918 doing in the Salzkammergut in 1927 fixing up a commoner's romance]; everyone spoke and sang in standard English but the guest from Berlin [but not his daughter] spoke Sergeant Schulz broken English and the guest from Vienna spoke Arthur Schwarzenegger broken English and when each began singing they lost the accent and lapsed into standard English. 

I haven't seen the show in 40 years and only know it now from records but it was interesting that more and more of the production in Graz came back to me as this show unfolded. One was that the show began in Graz with a steamer of tourists docking at the hotel, here it began with a yodeling mail delivery; there was a big production with a cow I hadn't remembered until I saw it again; I had forgotten about the character Gustl, the piccolo, and the servant Johann which are non-singing roles and so don't appear on any of the records.

Another jogged remembrance was the entrance of Franz Josef. When he appeared on the stage in the Graz production about half the audience stood up and stayed standing as long as he was on the stage. I realized later it was done to honor the Emperor.

At the time Franz Josef seemed a million years in the past.  But it struck me in Wooster that 2005  is 43 years  from the time I saw the show in Graz but it was only 45 years from the time of the show in Graz back to the end of the Empire.

All the shows were sold out. The audience was 80% old couples, over 60, over 70, even older. Since husbands die earlier,  I expected to see few men and that the couples would be two women. Instead, most of the elderly women were with elderly men, presumably their husbands. Everybody was dressed well but the younger ones [those under 60] tended to be very well dressed. Some of the women were even wearing evening dresses for the night performances.

A Soldier's Promise / Der gute Kamerad is by Kalman who composed Gräfin Mariza and Die Czardaszfürstin. This one hasn't been done in the US or in Europe since WW1 and I had never even heard its name. About halfway through the first act I began getting very restless and figured I would never see it again; by the second act I realized it wasn't an operetta, it was an opera, an Italian verismo opera, that was touching and moving with beautiful music and well performed . 

It had originally been set in Austria after the German Civil War but this production changed the time to Austria after WW1 and the end of the Empire. A soldier is coming to his dead buddy's estate to report his death and give the family his last letter. The family has also lost the father and another son in the war and the messenger gets mistaken for the dead son [it's too complicated to explain how but the plot is actually rational and believable.]

Problems arise because the daughter begins getting sexually interested in the returned soldier and she thinks he is her brother; the comedy aspects of the piece also have an incest theme since a mushroom farmer is trying to prevent his daughter from marrying his uncle ["can't you marry anyone except one of your siblings?"]; they do marry but because he is an uncle by marriage and not by blood it is acceptable] but there are violent jars between the main plot and this comic relief plot.

The whole second act is extremely beautiful and moving, perhaps especially moving now because of the soldiers being killed in Iraq.

Wooster and the area around it isn't the America I grew up in or the America I live in now. I have never felt so "un-white" as I did there. It wasn't just that there were no African Americans [I saw two [2] and they were together] or Asians but even the Europeans were not like me. Everyone was blond or white haired, pale pale pale skin, blue or grey or green eyes.

[It didn't register until later in the trip but even the very first people I saw were in that category: I had stopped at a different motel to get directions to my motel and noticed that the lobby was jammed with frumpy white women; it turned out that Planned Parenthood was having a convention in Wooster while I was there. What registered on me then was their dourness and frumpiness, but later so did their whiteness.] 

The only non-pale exceptions that I saw were the casts in the operettas, a very small proportion of the audience members and some of the technical people working at the theater. But whether at the theater or in downtown Wooster or in the rural area or in the surrounding small towns, everybody else was really white - and by the way, healthy looking. Basically no one overweight and even the very elderly people at the theater who were using canes, still were otherwise trim and healthy looking for their age.

Between A Soldier's Promise and Maytime I had supper at the Old Jaol Brewing Company in the middle of Wooster.  In spite of the bad name it was a good restaurant. Their early bird specials [you had to move fast to get to two shows and eat] included prime rib with salad, potato and vegetable for $12.

Maytime is theoretically an American operetta but it's actually a re-write of [or at least based on] a German operetta, Wie einst in Mai by Kollo [which I've never seen and never heard on a record]. From the program notes it looks like Romberg wrote completely new music and moved the setting from Berlin to New Orleans, both ante-bellum and post-bellum.

This was the third of the operettas that wasn't exactly an operetta; although there were some comedy highlights to it [mainly the thread of a relative who keeps marrying new wives] the show was basically serious. Also - and I don't know if this is the original or just in this staging - the show was done as a 19th Century melodrama which fit perfectly 19th century New Orleans. Wealthy girl is in love with one of her father's workers, forbidden to marry, married off to a degenerate wastrel who gambles away her fortune. There also is an epilogue set in the 1920s where the grandchildren of the lovers meet and get married.

There was a relatively heavy plot and, perhaps because of the Southern setting, kept bringing Showboat to mind. There's only one song that's remained famous but it's one that every body knows [Sweetheart, sweetheart, sweetheart; will you love me ever ...... ] and it worked very well in a melodrama setting as it ended the first act which actually became realistic and moving.

This was one of the shows which had alternate casts for the principals since the roles were so vocally demanding. Both principals sang well but Ottilie, the rich man's daughter, was extremely good. There was a very good set for the first act in front of the family mansion in New Orleans and an all right one for the high class bordello / gambling house of the second act. I found it interesting that, based on the plot, the Civil War and the South's defeat had absolutely no effect on the city or the family.

The next day on the way to  Sugar  Valley, I passed through Winesburg Ohio, yes THE Winesburg Ohio. I saw no indication of any tourist activity in connection with the book, just Amish and farm type things, so I took a picture of the main street and of the library. 

Sugar Valley was settled by Swiss Anabaptists and developed differently than the Pennsylvania settlements. They're trying to turn the town into what Americans think a Swiss village is: false chalet fronts are being added to the buildings, Swiss flags are flown, Swiss alpine music is piped into the streets via loud speaker. The anchor of the movement is the Alpine Hills Museum [the large blue-ish building in the picture]. Generally it is well done and it has far more historical rationale than Alexandria pushing its Scotland connection. But there are still are odd commercial contrasts, like the Amish T Shirt Store across from the museum. 

 Here and all over the area motorcycles were a much bigger proportion of the traffic than in DC / Virginia. The riders, though, were different than the ones you see in the Blue Ridge. There they're long distance tourers, mostly man and wife. Here you could tell from their machines, their clothes and their riding positions that they were local, not long distance riders.  Ohio's always had the reputation of being a motorcycle center and the headquarters of the AMA is in Columbus. I was tempted to go to their Motorcycle Hall of Fame Museum but there was too little time.

The drive back to Virginia was the expected light traffic on two-lane US-250 for about 25 miles except for buggies that would slow traffic up; Interstate 77 [which runs from Cleveland to the Carolinas] was almost truck free and I-70 the main east west route had only a few; there was fast traffic through West Virginia to Western Maryland until where the Pennsylvania Turnpike fed in near Hagerstown. Then very heavy but moving traffic. The drive back was accompanied by a 4 hour polka hour being broadcast from Akron Ohio and then by  an Italian tarantella hour broadcast - strangely - from Fairmount West Virginia. 

1,001 miles at 28.1 mpg with gas ranging from $2.51 in Virginia to $2.39 in Ohio

Updated 8/22/2005

Manhattan January 2002	Exchange Place June 2003	Asheville House Sep 2002	Manhattan April 2003	Graduation Birthday May 2003	Hoboken October 2003	Operetta and Amish 2005	Jersey City / Manhattan  September 2004	Thomas' Graduation May 2002	Hoboken and Harrison Fall 2005	Operetta and Ohio Cities 2006	Jersey City and Three Broadway Revivals April 2004
Manhattan December 2001	Manhattan March 2002	Manhattan April 2002	Andrew/Laura Wedding Oct 2002	Wedding Pictures Oct 2002	Ashland King's Dominion	Cumberland and Western Maryland RR 2005		Exchange Place June 2003	Jersey City and Manhattan Trolley Tour  November 2004	Hoboken and Harrison Fall 2005	Comments? Corrections? Broken Links?

  Home Tubes           Home German