Word: blitzstein
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...well be sung before long from the stage of the Metropolitan Opera House-and quite an aria they would make for Leonard Warren or Giorgio Tozzi. Last week the Met announced that it has taken an option on a Sacco-Vanzetti opera by 55-year-old Composer Marc Blitzstein, to be written on commission from the Ford Foundation...
...young music student in the '20s, Composer Blitzstein (Regina, The Cradle Will Rock) was an avid follower of the Sacco-Vanzetti case. He felt, like many other Americans, that the two anarchists were innocent and "were not being executed for what they were tried for" (shooting down a paymaster and his guard in a 1920 payroll holdup in South Braintree, Mass.). In 1932 Blitzstein used the theme for a one-act opera titled Condemned. The work was never produced (it was burdened with, among other things, four choruses), and Blitzstein says he forgot all about it. Last summer...
Juno (book by Joseph Stein, music and lyrics by Marc Blitzstein, dances by Agnes de Mille) is a Pyrrhic victory of Broadway talent over an Irish genius. This musical version of Sean O'Casey's Juno and the Paycock paradoxically mutes O'Casey's inner music with song, fetters his soaring spirit with dance, and deflects the lyric flow of his dialogue into prosy pools of talk...
...Mille solo, powerfully danced by Juno's doomed son (Tommy Rail), makes a poignant moment out of the life-destroying blight of Ireland's "Troubles." Two lovers' laments, One Kind Word and For Love, affectingly sung by Loren Driscoll and Monte Amundsen, highlight a Marc Blitzstein score that is more thoughtful than tuneful. Stars Douglas and Booth have the skill and charm to appear to be singing and dancing while actually talking and jogging. But Juno cannot solve its main problem: how to do O'Casey short of actually doing O'Casey...
...sudden, violent switch of emotional tone, the ironic play on the tension between gaiety and sorrow, are typical of O'Casey, and their effect is heightened by Marc Blitzstein's music and Anges de Mille's choreography. Tommy Rall does the informer's dance with what looks like incredible virtuosity. The incident is milked a little too heavily, but it works...