Santa on Broadway

A week before Christmas, the New York Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson composed an open letter to Santa Claus (alias Billy Rose). All that Composer-Critic Thomson wanted in 1949 (from the hands of Producer Rose): "A really modern [medium-sized] operatic repertory theater ... a quality operation." As for grand opera, said Thomson: "Leave all those outsize 19th Century works" to the Metropolitan, "till they and the Met collapse together . . ."

Last week, Thomson--and many another opera fan--had what he asked for: modern, medium-sized opera. On Broadway, where Gian-Carlo Menotti's terrifying but tuneful The Medium (TIME, June 30, 1947) was holding spooky seances for sellout audiences, Benjamin Britten's pocket-sized opera, The Rape of Lucretia, opened in Billy Rose's Ziegfeld Theater.

Billy did not produce it. But with all his shelved ideas for speeding up the ponderous Met (TIME, Sept. 6), he could hardly have improved on Agnes de Mille's staging of The Rape of Lucretia or on John Piper's handsome sets, imported from Britten's Britain. Dark-eyed Kitty Carlisle looked ravishing as Lucretia and sang almost as well. George Tozzi (as Tarquinius) sang a fine baritone. As demanded, it was a quality operation, even if it fell short of being a quality opera.

Benjy Britten seemed to have designed his apt but unexciting score to be unobtrusive, to let the words stand out. Poet Ronald Duncan's libretto had plenty of words--a male & female chorus moralized throughout--but it had too little to say and too little action. The rape scene got listeners on seat edge, but the other scenes slowed down to the speed of a grade-school tableau. Even the Herald Tribune's Thomson was disappointed: "There isn't enough music to hold the ear." Wrote his opposite number, Drama Critic Howard Barnes: "Music without a play."

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