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This Daughter of the Regiment is a great memento of Beverly Sills in one of her best roles. She once described her part in Donizetti's screwball comedy as "Lucille Ball with high notes." In this enjoyable 1974 performance, that's how she plays the unsophisticated orphan girl adopted by a regiment of Napoleon's army, smitten with a peasant lad, and unwillingly betrothed to a decadent duke. Her larger-than-life presence is supported by a musically and comically capable cast, oriented toward broad comic effects, with results something like a high-grade sitcom. Donizetti originally wrote the opera to a French libretto and later adapted it in Italian. Sung in English, it often sounds a bit like Gilbert and Sullivan. The music is both witty and spectacular, with plenty of high-note acrobatics (which Sills and William McDonald negotiate gracefully) and slapstick interactions for Spiro Malas as the gruff Sergeant Sulpice and Muriel Costa-Greenspon as the socially pretentious Marquise. --Joe McLellan
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