About the work
The Game of Love is an English-language musical with music by Jacques Offenbach, adapted and supplemented with additional music by Nancy Ford, and book and lyrics by Tom Jones. It draws on Arthur Schnitzler's plays Anatol and Anatol's Megalomania and had its premiere on 15 June 1965.
Plot
In late-nineteenth-century Vienna, the young playboy Anatol, narrated by his friend Max, drifts through a series of shallow love affairs with different women until he learns that love follows rules all its own.
Cultural significance
The show turns Schnitzler's Viennese comedy of manners into a so-called pasticcio piece built on existing Offenbach music; a revised 2008 version continues to be staged mainly by repertory and university theatres, including an Off-Broadway production in 2012.