Present Incumbent

Nothing succeeds like an Italian opera singer who would rather split smoke in a nightclub than shatter chandeliers in an opera house. The pay is high, and the hazards are few. All such a singer has to do is to practice smiling appreciatively when the ignorant masses press in to say: "You are the greatest since Mario Lanza."

The incumbent Lanza is Sergio Franchi. Late of Cremona, he is the new favorite son of Las Vegas. And he opened last week as headliner at Manhattan's Copacabana. At Vegas' Hotel Sahara, he was not the headliner but merely a vocal lead-in to Comedian Shelley Berman--to Berman's considerable embarrassment, since Franchi kept getting standing ovations and multiple encores.

Singing a laryngeal ragout, Franchi booms out Shenandoah, Arrivederci Roma, an aria from Tosca, a flamenco number, even Chicago in Italian. He is a tall, thin fellow who begins stiffly but soon has his tie and jacket off and his shirt unbuttoned. His big tenor has baritone depth. It lacks the bel canto sweetness of high operatic stature, but it has a lot of impressive thunder. "Most people have never been in an opera house," says Sergio's musical director.

"When they see Sergio step back ten feet from a microphone and fill up a room, it's a new experience." For that matter, Sergio himself has never been in an opera house of major importance--at least not as a singer. But he has sung all the great tenor roles on bush-league tours of South Africa and Europe.

Everywhere he goes, fans are all over him. In Vegas, women slipped him notes containing their room numbers and other meaningful data. But Sergio is a family man, with a wife and two children living in London, and he threw all the notes away. He can reach high C without effort, but he contorts his face, whites his knuckles, and sobs a little to let the fans know that he is hitting a home run. Sometimes he misses on purpose, making his upper register sound like a row of tuberculous frogs. The audience dies for him. But he gamely tries again, hitting the note perfectly the second time. They cheered him for it last week at the Copa. They always do.

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