It is again my great pleasure to introduce another Production of Rushden Amateur Operatic Society.

Our Patrons can be assured that no effort has been spared to make “The Dancing Years” as happy and attractive a Show as the twenty-five Productions of the Society which have preceded it.

I am delighted to welcome Mr John Henderson as our Producer for the second year running and it is a source of the greatest pleasure that our friend Miss Barbara A G Coales has once more undertaken the Choreography for us.

We hope with the aid of our many Patrons, coupled with the excellent financial and loyal support of our Vice-Presidents, once again to fulfil our sincere desire to make a generous sum available for the support of local charities.

The Society will always welcome applications from anyone interested in joining.  Applications should be made to the Secretary, 135 High Street, Rushden.

My personal thanks and appreciation to all concerned.

RUDI KLEBER is a young composer living at an inn just outside Vienna in 1911.  He is poor – so poor in fact that he is being thrown out because he cannot pay his rent, and his piano, which now stands in the garden, has been sold over his head.  All this has happened while Rudi was picking flowers in the early hours of the morning with Grete, the fifteen-year-old girl whose aunt owns the inn.  When a party of officers and actresses come out from Vienna to have breakfast in the garden, Rudi offers to play waltzes for them in the hope of raising the money to buy back his piano.  They are joined by Maria Zeigler, star of the Viennese operetta, who is so taken with one of the waltzes that she buys it for a thousand Kronen, and moreover persuades her lover Prince Metterling to allow Rudi to occupy an empty studio in his palace.  Little Grete is being sent to England to school, and before she goes she makes Rudi promise that he will not ask anyone else to marry him without giving her the first refusal.  During the next few months Rudi enjoys enormous success as the result of the music he writes for Maria, and the two of them fall deeply in love.  Three years later, Maria has left Metterling and is living with Rudi.  She is worried because she cannot understand why he will not ask her to marry him; but when Grete returns and she overhears Rudi apparently proposing to her she thinks she understands the reason, and in her distress marries the faithful Metterling.  She does not know that Grete had observed where Rudi’s heart really lay, and that his proposal had merely been the formality whereby she had absolved him from his promise.  Too late the explanations follow, and the broken-hearted lovers part.  Twelve years later they meet again, and Rudi asks Maria to come away with him.  She promises to do whatever he tells her – after he has met someone else.  That someone is her son – Rudi’s son – though the world believes him to be Metterling’s.  The boy of course does not know his father, and Rudi realizes he cannot destroy his son’s world for his own selfishness.