Opera Can Be Fun

Gian-Carlo Menotti has a talent for making small things go over big. He has even been overpraised as a new Puccini. Last year, a pair of his chamber operas, The Telephone and The Medium, were a surprise Broadway hit (TIME, March 3, 1947). Last week, Menotti gave New York a look at two of his earlier operas, and proved again that a night at the opera can be almost as much fun as a circus.

Amelia Goes to the Ball, which was no crashing success when produced at the Metropolitan Opera ten years ago, is a rambunctious drawing-room farce about a woman who is so anxious to get to a ball that she cracks her husband over the head with a vase, has her lover arrested, and finally sweeps off with the chief of police. Beside The Old Maid and the Thief, the other half of the evening's bill, it seemed pretty thin.

The Old Maid was originally written for the perishable market place of radio. It is a near-slapstick story of a small-town spinster who plays hostess to a hobo until he runs off with her maid and car. The libretto is a gag-writer's dream, filled with skillful swoons (by Marie Powers, star of The Medium), gay tunes, and amateur-theatrical hamming. The audience loved every minute of it, right down to the final clinch and the hero's preposterous curtain line--"Your mouth is an abyss."

Composer Menotti, who dislikes most modern music ("Where is the melody?"), is a man who crams his own with things to hum. Critics sometimes complain that his music sounds 19th Century and facile. But audiences take it at its own cheerful level, and eat it up.

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