Word: divas
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...ingenuity with which Hollywood scenarists arrange opportunities for the heroines of musical comedies to perform their function of singing is matched only by the lack of ingenuity with which they observe the tradition that all musical comedy heroines must be singers by profession. Now Grace Moore, as an Australian diva named Louise Fuller, yodels a Jerome Kern-Dorothy Fields song called The Whistling Boy when a crowd of urchins follows her into a rehearsal hall. When her husband (Gary Grant), whom she has acquired as a convenient way of complying with U. S. immigration quota laws, is trying to persuade...
most Hollywood productions starring opera singers of established reputations, Soprano Lily Pons's second cinema vehicle is really less a moving picture than a recorded concert with illustrations on the screen. As such it is satisfying entertainment. Vivacious little Diva Pons yodels a nameless vocal exercise, an adaptation of Panofka's Tarantella, an Arthur Schwartz tune called Seal It With a Kiss and, for the inevitable climax on the stage of the Metropolitan Opera, the Una voce poco fa aria from The Barber of Seville, in which she turns loose the fastest high C yet released...
...down a flight of steps backstage and broke her ankle. After it was tightly bound she went on singing Brünnhilde, became so absorbed in the role that she never even limped, collapsed only when the curtain fell. As a person Fremstad was as incalculable as a storybook diva. When she swept off stage she was as likely to embrace every one she passed as she was to wither them with a glance. Once she suddenly discovered that her name had 13 letters, forthwith had herself billed as Olivia Fremstad, changed back again to Olive when she realized that...
...thoroughly bored with lonely success, finds him driving a taxi, turns his bad opera into good musicomedy. Agreeably sung by Lily Pons are four songs by Jerome Kern, including a waltz called I Dream Too Much, Little Jockey on the Carrousel and I've Got Love which the diva has described as a " 'ot song, very 'ot." The picture also introduces blandly comic Eric Blore (Top Haf) and an amiable seal. Good shot: Blore & seal gazing reproachfully at Miss Pons, who has stolen the seal's breakfast fish, cooked it for her husband...
...laugh, mincing along with a bird cage. In Carmen she wanders backstage selling papier-mache pumpkins. In L'Anima Allegro, she was a pipe-smoking gypsy crone (see cut). In Tannhauser few years ago she substituted for Maria Jeritza as the corpse of Elizabeth, because that strapping diva dreaded being carried down a stage mountain on a small bier. And in dozens of other operas "Maman" Maria Savage is a familiar figure to music-loving New Yorkers. She is one of the 105 hard-drilled men & women who swarm the stage singing choruses, gesticulating vivaciously...