One follow-up to the earlier posting. The Post’s TV critic gave an excellent slam to this show, which I can tell is stupid without having watched it. However, he slights their use of Strauss waltzes in a supposed “ball” scene. “Even the super-rich,” apparently, “don’t put up with Strauss anymore.”

If there is anything more depressing than dancing to recorded versions of the Official Happy Music of an era gone this last century and a half, it is this: Imagine yourself in the moldering but still-elegant ballroom of a grand hotel or European villa. The walls are gorgeous white-and-gold-ormolu; the high arched windows look down on the city below from behind damask draperies that must weigh fifty pounds per foot. Three giant chandeliers hang overhead. But what is this? They’re not lit. The only light emanates from a light-and-fog machine onstage. Seventy percent of the ballroom’s gigantic cork-padded maple floor has been carpeted (and parts appear to be duct-taped together, at that). What remains has been covered in thin parquet. The music? A DJ. Playing bad eighties music, because everyone in the room was in high school in 1985. Or — possibly worse — a lousy local band playing cover versions of bad eighties music.

Herr Kapellmeister? Bitte, “An der Schoenen Blau’n Donau.”