Still Gay Weeds of Widowhood

Nostalgia has come home to roost on Broadway. For the fourth* time in nine months an oldtime Viennese-type operetta started packing in the customers. This time it was Franz Lehar's The Merry Widow.

The new Merry Widow left oldtimers in the first-night audience starry-eyed with memories of the 1907 days when Widows Ethel Jackson (see cut) and Lina Abar-banell, in hats reminiscent of poultry dinners, sang it for a Broadway run of 421 performances. In the orchestra pit, conducting its willowy waltzes with a hand dipped in authentic Viennese schmalz, was the oldest Merry Widower of them all, bald, paunchy Robert Stolz, who raised a baton on the first Vienna production (1905).

Visually the New Opera Company's Merry Widow is as up-to-date as a Reno divorce. Smartly streamlined by Director Felix Brentano (a former Max Reinhardt protege) and studded with billowing ballets by George Balanchine, Lehar's masterpiece now looks like something that had just stepped out of a Park Avenue boudoir.

To add to The Merry Widow's box-office appeal, the New Opera Company departed from its past policy of using only youthful U.S. unknowns. It hired world-famed Polish Operatic Tenor Jan Kiepura for leading man, gave the part of the Widow to his wife, Marta Eggerth. Redheaded Hungarian Cinemactress Eggerth, an enticing peach sundae in liberally flounced weeds, gave Lehar fans all they could ask.

* The first three: Johann Strauss's Rosalinda (Die Fledermaus); Sigmund Romberg's The Student Prince; Rudolf Friml's The Vagabond King.

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