The Student Prince

(1924) Music by Sigmund Romberg Book and Lyrics by Dorothy Donnelly Based on the play Old Heidelberg by Wilhelm Meyer-Forster The Student Prince, the longest-running Broadway musical of the 1920s, is for many theater-goers the quintessential romantic operetta. Hungarian-born composer Sigmund Romberg cashed in on his earlier musical training in Vienna and created a magical score of waltzes and marches, all set to Dorothy Donnelly’s adaptation of a 1901 German play titled Old Heidelberg. Prince Karl-Franz, accompanied by his tutor Dr. Engel and pompous valet Lutz, arrives at Heidelberg University, but finds his studies less enticing than the waitress Kathie at the local inn. The age-old clash between love and duty rears its head when he is summoned back home to the deathbed of his grandfather and ordered to marry Princess Margaret. Romberg’s score brims over with tunes that you will be humming as you walk in and walk out of the theater: “Golden Days,” “Overhead the Moon Is Beaming,” “Just We Two,” “Deep in My Heart Dear,” and, of course, that most rousing of libation songs, “Drink, Drink, Drink.”