Sills Takes to the Tube

By William Bender

Not since the days of Rosa Ponselle a half-century ago has the U.S. had as beloved and popular a native operatic soprano as Brooklyn-born Beverly Sills. The Sills phenomenon stems mainly from her unmatched musical and theatrical skills. But it helps that what she has, she flaunts--tirelessly. This season is typical. Sills will give recitals in such cities as Syracuse, Boulder, and Birmingham, Ala. She will also appear as soloist with orchestras in Miami Beach, Houston, and Evansville, Ind., sing Lucia di Lammermoor with opera companies in Milwaukee and Omaha, star at the San Francisco Opera and visit Los Angeles with her home company, the New York City Opera.

Although it seems impossible, it could be that there are some opera lovers somewhere who have never had the chance to observe Sills at work. If so, they will want to be at their TV sets next week when Sills stars in a two-hour presentation, in English and color, of Donizetti's 1840 comic opera Daughter of the Regiment (PBS, Monday, Oct. 14). Taped last summer during an actual performance at the Wolf Trap Farm Park for the Performing Arts outside Washington, D.C., Daughter marks Sills' first appearance on TV in a complete opera. It is also a highly amusing adornment of Sills' lengthy repertory of damned dames and loony ladies. It further affirms her reputation as a singing actress without peer in all of opera today --be it deep tragedy, high comedy or that vast operatic ground in between.

The Daughter of the Regiment stands somewhere in that middle ground. In the Wolf Trap production, which has a splendid supporting cast (notably Tenor William McDonald, Bass Spiro Malas, Mezzo Muriel Costa-Greenspun) and is crisply conducted by Charles Wendelken-Wilson, Sills plays Maria, a lowly orphan girl who has been adopted and reared by a regiment of Napoleon's soldiers in the Austrian Tyrol. The love of her life, Tonio, a young peasant who wears short pants and sings a high C at any sign of affection, joins the troop to be near her--alas, just as Marie's mother, a marquise, shows up, claims her and takes her away to teach her how to curtsy instead of salute. At the end, the lovers are reunited and everyone joins in a rejoicing chorus: "Hurrah for France."

Daughter lacks the stature of Donizetti's comic masterpieces Don Pasquale and L'Elisir d'Amore, but it does provide Sills with countless opportunities for lambent fioriture, whistling-high E-flats, and howling farce. Her windup salute, which starts somewhere near her right thigh and then circles deliciously upward, has to be seen to be believed. So does the way she gives her dancing master a knee in the chin, or wraps him around her neck while learning to do the quadrille.

Sills' exuberant performance comes across even on the tube. "I'd say that Daughter of the Regiment is like one long episode of Lucille Ball," she laughs. Odds are that a lot of TV viewers will soon come to love Beverly at least as much as Lucy.

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