Word: fausts
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Francisco Opera makes most of the popular stops on the grand-opera highway, e.g., Carmen, Aïda, La Bohème. But San Francisco takes peculiar pride in traveling the byways as well. For its opener last week, San Francisco characteristically chose a seldom-heard version of the Faust legend, Arrigo Boito's Mefistofele, instead of Gounod's war horse, Faust...
...French-Swiss border, they saw Voltaire's chateau and talked about Candide. In Augsburg, a Lutheran pastor who spoke no English gave them a lecture on the Reformation, and they tried but failed to get into the monastery where Luther once lived. Next on the list was Faust, but since Weimar is behind the Iron Curtain, they had to settle for Frankfurt am Main, where Goethe was born...
...other respects the new musical has nothing to do with the old. Its casual plot describes the attempt of an oldtime Hollywood hoofer to get a foot back on Broadway as the partner of a temperamental ballerina. The show they are rehearsing is a sort of boogie Faust, and there is the devil to pay in the form of an overemotional producer (Jack Buchanan). Also on hand for some mild laughs: Pianist Oscar Levant, whom Hollywood seems to regard as inevitable a backstage fixture as the fire bucket...
Ezio Pinza, as Fiodor Chaliapin, the greatest basso of all time, seems to bring back some of the grandeur of the eccentric, boisterous Russian's voice. Singing the Coronation scene from Moussorgsky's Boris Godounov, he booms forth with amazing volume and gusto. Excerpts from Gounod's Faust also receive the same resounding treatment...
...still looking at the light. You ask her about the play, about Welles' Faust...