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A REFASHIONED IMAGE OF REVOLUTION AS MUSICAL THEATRE was intensified by László Váradys "sparklingly energetic" musical direction.''? Várady and some of the musicians came from Szeged, where he had reformed playing operas with Viktor Vaszy. The reputation of the Operetta Theatre was raised by the fact that Varady, its music director, had graduated as a student of Zoltan Kodaly and Led Weiner and gained experience in German opera houses as an assistant to Bruno Walter and Wilhelm Furtwängler. Margit Gäspär’s company could set high standards not only because of excellent actors, directors, designers and dancers, but also because of firstrate conductors, mainly Tamäs Brödy and Ferenc Gyulai Gaäl in addition to Värady. “Such a company worked in the Operetta Theatre neither before nor after.”!'? IMPACT AND POSTERITY Theatres picked up and dropped Students of Vienna fairly quickly, but its performance at the Operetta Theatre made the genre and the stars of operetta also popular for a new audience. According to an entry in the promptbook and the cultural statistics of the Ministry of Culture, 95,103 spectators saw Students of Vienna in 96 performances held en suite until 26* December, 1949. At the time of its last performances in Budapest, its premiere took place in Miskolc, and three more theatres (in Kecskemét, Szeged and Pécs) produced it within the next four months. Later it was played only in Kaposvar in 1960 and 1974 (but not in the spirit of Tamas Ascher’s politically rather frivolous State Department Store), and this fact shows its close connection to the period of communist takeover and to the idea of revolution after World War II. However, it played an important role in 1949 in making operetta beloved of a new audience, as Students of Vienna was played for people with a new type of season ticket and for larger groups as well, similarly to other productions in nationalized theatres, so auditoriums were “mostly filled with workers”.' Old devotees of the genre may have bought a large number of tickets too, but the audience included at least the same proportion of those who had previously known operetta only from hits and not from theatrical performances. According to the evaluation of the Ministry at the end of the season, the first “experiment of the Operetta Theatre failed, due to concessions to the 12 Téth: Kapunyitas, 7. 18 György Szirtes: Színház a Broadway-n, Budapest, Népszava, 1990, 28. M Korossy: Színházirányítás, 91. — Artists of state theatres created brigades to go to factories, hold cheerful shows and sell season tickets themselves. In addition, “cheaper tickets were sold for workers and soldiers, so about two-thirds of the theatres’ capacity was filled with organized audiences”. (Ibid., 60.) In the 1949-1950 season 140,000 of the approximately 2,100,000 tickets available in theaters in the capital were booked by state agencies, 450,000 were sold as season tickets and 550,000 to groups. (Ibid., 91.) + 38 +
