Word: aria
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When Anna-Lisa, still slim and pretty at 38, sang her first aria, from Puccini's Gianni Schicci, her bright-colored soprano was tight and quivering with nerves. It loosened up in arias from Gounod's Romeo and Juliet and Charpentier's Louise. By the time she had sung duets from La Boheme and Romeo with Jussi, she had proved she had something more than a talented amateur's equipment, if something less, after too many years away from public singing, than a professional way of using it. She would get a chance to correct that...
...crone off. When two of the orange-housed princesses die of thirst in the desert, the stage audience saves the third by rushing to the rescue with a fire-bucket of water brought in from the wings. Biggest laugh: Basso Richard Wentworth's grotesquely funny dance and aria as the huge, bosomy lady cook from whom the prince steals the three oranges by charming her with a piece of ribbon...
...already sold out through August. He had also brought up a new voice. Menotti-veteran Marie (The Medium) Powers, contralto, got her due from the audience for her moving performance as the resistance leader's mother. But it was tall, dark, Brooklyn-born Soprano Neway whose powerful denunciation aria in the second act stopped the show. When the curtain came down the new Broadway opera had to share the cheers with a new Broadway star...
...part of Aeneas makes the best use of James Perrin's good voice. Ruth Beaver, who stepped in to sing Belinda at the last minute, and Anna Shackford make their duct, "Fear no danger to ensue," the loveliest aria of all. Malcolm Holmes has unusual success in getting the very most out of his able orchestra and chorus. Most exciting of all is Judith Haskell's choreography...
...performances had not been of the best. True, there was not always money for new sets, and casting problems were sometimes insoluble. "When an artist's health fails two hours before curtain or he collapses in mid-aria," says easygoing Edward Johnson, "you have problems. Those are the things that give a man white hair." But some of the Met's ailments-clumsy staging, sloppy ensembles, a tendency to be unimaginative about new sets-might have been cured by a more demanding and more disciplinary hand...