And surely you meant 'Freddie'....By the weirdest stroke of coincidence as I typed the word Freddie they began to play Bohemian Rhapsody over at PGE Park where a ball game is in progress. Is this a good omen ?

Katie; I just looked this up on Wikipedia and it is waaaay too good to be dealt with in a line or two. Watch this space.

An interesting point about marketing, Lorin. I smiled to myself as I wondered whether "Coming to the Keller soon - Monteverd's smash-hit musical L'incoronazione di Poppea!!" might attract a different demographic to Portland Opera.

I don't think it is that there was no distinction between musical theater before amplification came along. Carol Channing was certainly mic'd for Hello Dolly in 1964 and there seems to be evidence of previous amplification taking place. What I suspect happened is that as the quality of amplification improved in the 1960's to keep pace with the growing demand for more sophisticated recordings in the pop industry so Broadway impresarios realised that they could employ a good looking but not necessarily strong singer in a role and beef-up his/her voice. Gradually this became the norm enabling a singer on Broadway to perform her role seven or eight times in a week which he or she would have been unable to do if he or she were to be depending entirely on an un-amplified voice. Opera impresarios obviously decided against going down that road and so that distinction arose: put crudely, if the singers were mic'd it was musical theater and if not it was opera.

I do like your analogy with the book world.

I am not prepared to accept so easily "the perfection that is Sweeney" It is a fine show I'll grant you. I think it hasn't had a truly successful production in a top-flight opera company. It was done at the Royal Opera House a couple of seasons ago but wasn't received with un-alloyed praise. In fairness the blame for that attached mainly to the singers rather than the show but having seen both the 'live' show and the recent movie I am not persuaded it can fall into the opera category even with good casting.

I recently came across a review of a book entitled The Rise and Fall of the Broadway Musical by Mark N. Grant. I suspect you would enjoy this book and the review itself has much interesting stuff in it. It may be found here:

http://www.talkinbroadway.com/rialto/past/2005/02_11_05.html

...why is Porgy and Bess called an opera...

The main reason is that although Porgy and Bess was destined for Broadway, Gershwin had always conceived of the work as an opera, in which important plot information was transmitted not by means of spoken dialogue--the typical device in musical theater—but rather through sung recitative, which was common practice in the operatic repertoire that Gershwin would have known. While Gershwin’s librettist, DuBose Heyward, thought that spoken dialogue would “give the opera speed and tempo,” the composer differed strongly and eventually overruled his collaborator. Porgy and Bess was revived in 1942 with spoken dialogue replacing the sung recitatives, but during the 1950s, as it toured opera houses around the world, the work regained much of its original operatic form, and it’s this version that we see and hear today.

and Show Boat a musical?

Again, primarily because the musical numbers are separated by spoken dialogue, which was not the way plot information was typically presented in opera. (I would argue that by citing Abduction from the Seraglio or Magic Flute, you've given a couple of exceptions that prove the rule. Compared to the Italian melodramma of the 19th century, German-language Singspiel had very little lasting impact outside of its relatively limited geographical region. Given the fact that neither of those two works were performed with any regularity until right around the Second World War, Singspiel certainly wouldn't have been what came to mind when most people thought of or talked about "opera.")

It's worth noting that Show Boat entered the repertoire of the New York City Opera way back in 1954, making it the first Broadway show to attain truly operatic status, and that the work received a landmark production in 1983 at the Houston Grand Opera, which utilized Robert Russell Bennett's original orchestrations and a considerable amount of previously discarded tryout material.

just what is Kurt Weill's Street Scene?

During the 1930s, Weill had expressed an interest in creating "a special blend of musical theater which would completely integrate drama and music, spoken word, song, and movement," and Street Scene was his first major attempt at realizing this desire. "This form of theater has its special attraction for the composer," he wrote, "because it allows him to use a great variety of musical idioms, to write music that is both serious and light, operatic and popular, emotional and sophisticated, orchestral and vocal. Each show of this type has to create its own style, its own texture, its own relationship between words and music, because music becomes a truly integral part of the play -- it helps deepen the emotions and clarify the structure."

Weill was in a real sense addressing the European operatic tradition AND the tradition of American musical theater at the same time, and it's perhaps because of this that Street Scene is so difficult to classify. Like Porgy and Bess, it premiered on Broadway, and also like Gershwin's work, it's gained a reasonably secure place in the modern operatic canon.