Word: italian
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Turkish bellydancer was grinding away at Anita's challenge: "Let's see you do better." She did. With fundamental gesture-and no clothing save a pair of black lace panties-Haisch Nanah, 24, turned U.S. Socialite Peter Howard's birthday party for an Italian countess into haischish. Luckily, the poliziotti showed up before the 200 guests could succumb to Roman fever. Said the Vatican's L'Osservatort-Romano next day: "The lice of society...
...third opera put on at Dallas was a repeat of Rossini's rarely performed romp, L'ltaliana in Algeri, introducing 23-year-old Spanish Mezzo-Soprano Teresa Berganza. The possessor of a silvery, dulcet voice, she acted the title role (an Italian girl imprisoned by a libidinous bey) with a kind of fresh, provincial charm. A onetime pianist, Mezzo Berganza has toured Europe in recitals but has had little operatic experience. The Dallas News's Critic John Rosenfield noted that L'ltaliana in Algeri had "ended up as a love affair between prima donna and patrons...
Onstage in Dallas last week, this exchange took place in Italian between Maria Meneghini Callas and Tenor Jon Vickers in a new production of Medea (see below). But it also summed up Maria Callas' offstage exchange with a far more improbable Jason-the Metropolitan Opera's Rudolf Bing, who last week stunned the Met's public by casting Maria Callas out of his golden opera house...
Another story was Cavalleria, in a kind of performance that would have done well in a provincial Italian opera house. Dimitri Mitropoulos, when he was not drowning out the singers with his orchestra, conducted as if afflicted by an overdose of Miltown. Soprano Zinka Milanov found her still-beautiful voice crumbling around the edges. Allowances are customarily made for inept acting in prima donnas, but Diva Milanov plunged beyond the point of tolerance as she flung herself about the stage clutching her ample midriff. She provided a fine argument for bringing back Callas at all costs...
When a topnotch director, a novelist with a sense of humor, and a bunch of witty actors meet on the Italian Riviera, the result can be a good time. When the director is John Huston, the writer Truman Capote, and when the actors include Bogart, Lorre and Lollobrigida, the result was Beat the Devil, and it is a very good time...