Helen Goes to Broadway

When Jacques Offenbach's operetta La Belle Helene was first performed in Paris in the days of Empress Eugenie. Prince Metternich took one horrified gander at its neo-Homeric ribaldry, primly led his wife to the nearest exit. But La Belle Helene outlived Metternich. Last week, in a new version called Helen Goes to Troy, a lavish $140,000 Manhattan production that seemed likely to become Broadway's latest smash-hit musical, it was still going strong.

Produced by Yolanda Mero-Irion's New Opera Company (TIME, Nov. 9, 1942), Helen Goes to Troy has a revised book and a slightly altered cast of Olympians, including a seminude Venus who really earns her apple. The melodic champagne of its original score has been spiked (by Composer Erich Korngold) with heady draughts from a dozen other Offenbach operettas, including the Barcarolle from Tales of Hoffman. Its Helen is sung by chestnut-haired Czech . Soprano Jarmila Novotna, one of the few opera stars who can fill the eye as well as the ear.

Boulevards and Boudoirs. Helen Goes to Troy translates Homer into French bedroom farce. Its mythological Greeks and Trojans chase each other around marble bathtubs and across perfumed counterpanes. Its Hellas consists entirely of boulevards and boudoirs. Its Helen, beneath her classical robes, is a bored upper-class Parisienne whose bumbling bourgeois spouse Menelaus (well played by Ernest Truex) is sent on a trip to Naxos, returns unexpectedly to find his wife in bed with Paris, an unawakened but erotically gifted Trojan shepherd.

What makes Helen Goes to Troy as a show is the thing that has kept it alive for nearly a century: the inimitable lilt of Offenbach's music, a vulgar Parisian sheen that sparkles like the rhinestones in a cocotte's garter.

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