Straw-Hat Orpheus

High on a New Jersey hilltop, overlooking colonial steeples and the Delaware River, music fills the clear air six nights a week. It rises from a huge, floodlit, green and yellow tent, home of Lambertville's Music Circus. Under the big top (where there is room for 1,500) the attractions are Broadway shows (with good second-string casts) such as Gentlemen Prefer Blondes and Call Me Madam, and such vintage operettas as Sweethearts, New Moon and Die Fledermaus. Last week, the Music Circus put on view a frothy revival of Orpheus in the Underworld, by Jacques Offenbach. The new title: To Hell with Orpheus.

Excursion to Hades. Offenbach was a kind of 19th century, Parisian Cole Porter, only better. A superb musical satirist, he could also turn out sentimental waltzes and respectable grand opera, but his specialty was cancan, with its piston-like rhythm and irrepressible gaiety. Orpheus contains some of his best satire and his best cancan tunes. The libretto used at Lambertville (by the late Ring Lardner, with additional lyrics by Edward Eager) tries to modernize the original. The result is stained Varsity-Show humor, but still fun.

The show opens in a stiff-backed summer camp at Brunswick, Me. (in the original, the scene was Thebes), where a young matron named Eurydice Orpheus is shamelessly cuckolding her husband, a struggling violinist. Her lover: one John Stick, a dull poet. Enter Pluto, in the guise of a soft-drink peddler, who offers the lovers a permanent visit to Hades. Sample of his spiel:

If you would like a long vacation Your reservation I'll quickly fix--You'll simply love my old plantation Way down upon the River Styx!

The scene switches to Mount Olympus, where Jupiter is having trouble with his wife Juno. She berates him for his old trick of assuming the shape of a shepherd, a bull or a swan for purposes of dalliance ("Though the girls are squeezable," leers Cupid, "with a swan it isn't feasible"). Jupiter (well sung and acted by Baritone Ralph Herbert) takes Juno and the other gods on a junket to Hades, where they bump into Eurydice; after a few random shots from Cupid's bow, everything ends in a happy shambles. The "go-to-hell" joke is worked pretty hard in the dialogue, but that is offset by Offenbach's tunes. At least two of them. An Old Love Dies and Brunswick Maine, could be hits in any century.

Fire-Eater. The man responsible for this Orpheus, as well as for the circus itself, is St. John Terrell, 36, a Chicago-born showman who pronounces his given name "Sinjun," in the English fashion--not because he is English but, as he explains, because he started off his entertainment career as a fire-eater. After kicking around show business from the age of 16 (carnivals, U.S.O., Broadway and summer theater), he decided five years ago to set up a musical tent show. He picked Lambertville (pop. 4,477) because it was far enough from Broadway to avoid competition and near enough to Bucks County, Pa.'s "genius belt" to have an interested audience. Almost from the start, the tent has drawn big crowds all summer long. Last year's attendance: 160,000; this year's estimate: 175,000.

A man with many irons in the fire, Terrell owns a patent on his tent (it has only two poles), has a scheme for adding smell to the sight & sound of movies and TV, and an interest in three other music circuses around the country. His plans for Orpheus are ambitious: he hopes to open it on Broadway this winter. One of the hazards: another version of the same operetta planned for this season by Showman Billy Rose (see THEATER), who was never a fire-eater but can be counted on to produce a pretty hot Hades, too.

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