Word: lanza
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...Great Caruso (M-G-M), a quasi-biography of the late great tenor, is weak on facts and weaker as fiction, but as a well-recorded pops concert featuring the impressive voice of Mario Lanza (TIME, March 19), it is a tidy package of entertainment that music lovers can enjoy with their eyes shut...
Even the singing is occasionally marred by poor dubbing-a surprising lapse in MGM's usual technical proficiency-and by pointless attempts to make Tenor Lanza look effortless while performing arias that ordinarily require opera singers to flex every muscle. But Lanza is in fine voice, and with such artists as the Met's Soprano Dorothy Kirsten and Mezzo-Soprano Blanche Thebom, he sings varied favorites by 13 composers from Verdi to Victor Herbert. On the program: La Donna E Mobile and the Quartet from Rigoletto; Vesti la Giubba from I Pagliacci; the Sextette from Lucia De Lammermoor...
...Mario Lanza is a curly-haired young (29) movie singer who confesses breezily that he once scraped the label off a Caruso record and substituted one with his own name on it to get a part in an Air Force show. He can afford to be breezy now. After his first two movie roles (in That Midnight Kiss and The Toast of New Orleans'), Hollywood has cast Tenor Lanza as The Great Caruso, and Hollywood is inclined to feel that Caruso is doing well to get his name in the title. Meanwhile, so far as the new crop...
...rehearsal, Conductor Vladimir Bakaleinikoff had a hard time with Mario's squealing admirers. At one point Lanza started a stampede by throwing his handkerchief into the crowd. Cried Bakaleinikoff, when the uproar subsided for a moment: "This is a symphony orchestra. You must be verrry quiet-shut...
...pleasant surprise in That Midnight Kiss is Mario Lanza, a young (27) tenor with the spry, nonsensical air of a chipmunk and an Americanized-Caruso voice which gives style and seriousness to the whole production. His least appealing quality, which Metro will apparently exploit for some ten musicals, is the smily, complacent bounce which places him in Hollywood's long list of boys who rouse the maternal instinct...