Puccini & Fizz

Grand opera can learn a lot from show business--as the Metropolitan's Rudolf Bing has proved. In his three-year regime he has often drawn on Broadway and Hollywood talent (e.g., Alfred Lunt, Margaret Webster, Garson Kanin) to inject some extra fizz. Last week he tried a double injection on La Boheme, and proved that fizz does not necessarily improve good red wine.

Words & Action. For his stage director, Bing picked Hollywood Director Joseph L. Mankiewicz (Letter to Three Wives, All About Eve). Mankiewicz bubbled with ideas for bringing out the Bohemianism of Puccini's Bohemians. "Take the end of Act I," said he. "Mimi and Rodolfo usually go out the door on their way to the cafe. Let's be realistic--he wasn't taking Mimi anywhere right then. In my production, Rodolfo agrees to take Mimi out, but when she gets to the door he closes it and they fall into each others arms." In the last act, Mankiewicz decided to pique his audience by having two beds in the room: "People are going to start wondering which bed Mimi is going to die in, and she won't die in either one --she'll die in a chair." For the second part of his experiment, Bing ordered an English libretto from Howard Dietz, the Broadway, musical-comedy writer who fashioned the Met's lighthearted English text for Fledermaus.

Enemies of Opera? When the production got to the Met stage (and a national radio audience) last week, most of Mankiewicz' Bohemians acted their parts as well as sang them, showed signs of firm and intelligent directing. The New York Times's Olin Downes chided Mankiewicz for letting Rodolfo appear to seduce Mimi at the end of Act I ("cheap taste"). But on the whole, the critics treated Mankiewicz gently.

They saved their barbs for Dietz and his English translation. Part of the difficulty in translating standard tragic opera --especially Italian opera--for an American audience is an almost unavoidable one: Americans are simply not used to hearing English-speaking folks carry on in the exclamatory way that the heroes & heroines of opera do. But even so, plenty of Dietz's lines seemed to belong more to musicomedy than to La Boheme, e.g., "I've heard it said that love is very noble/ It has a reputation that is global" and "It's a feast /or a Roman/ It's warming my abdomen." Olin Downes and the Herald Tribune's Virgil Thomson ganged up on Dietz in one of their rare days of critical unanimity: "Hopelessly off-key," wrote Thomson. "A kind of a vulgar Gilbert & Sullivan patter . . . The worst enemies . . . of opera in English are as a rule the translators themselves," said Downes.

Fortunately for the future of the new production, everybody seemed to approve of Rolf Gerard's stage sets, the singing of Soprano Nadine Conner (as Mimi), and the orchestra under Alberto Erede. Next week, La Boheme lovers will have a chance to see the same production sung in old reliable Italian.

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