Northern Light Opera Company

About Us

The dictionary says light opera, sometimes called operetta, is a theatrical production that has many of the musical elements of opera but is lighter and more popular in subject and style and often contains spoken dialogue.

Possibly the height of English-language operetta was reached by Gilbert & Sullivan, who had a long-running collaboration in England during the Victorian era.

Operettas by Offenbach, Johann Strauss, Victor Herbert and Sigmund Romberg. were popular on the New York stage roughly between World War I (1914) and the Stockmarket crash of 1929. After this period, operettas gradually gave way to musical comedies, which used simple story lines to connect numerous songs. With the advent of Show Boat and Oklahoma, the musical started to bring back some of the elements of story so prominent in the operetta, to the point that musicals such as West Side Story, Les Miserables, and Phantom of the Opera, with little or no spoken dialog , are now closer to opera.

A subtle distinction between light opera and musicals might be that operettas emphasize music by acting, whereas a musical is usually a play with singing. Often, light opera's casts are classically trained singers and musicals use actors who sing.

To sum it up, everyone knows grand opera, and everyone knows what musicals are, and light opera fits between the two genres. The Northern Light Opera Company, located in Northern (Park Rapids) Minnesota, has been staging light opera performances since 2002.