Word: medea
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Early one Saturday last May, a thin, grim line started forming outside the Royal Opera House at London's Covent Garden. All through the long Whitsun weekend it sweltered and swelled, until, the following Tuesday, tickets went on sale for the first London performance of Cherubini's Medea in 89 years. Within three hours every seat in the house was sold out. Last week the lucky ticket holders finally got a look at what they had battled so tenaciously to see: Maria Meneghini Callas in the role of Euripides' savagely tormented heroine...
...Covent Garden production of Medea was the same one in which Callas triumphed in Dallas last year (TIME, Nov. 17); in an exchange agreement, Dallas will see the Royal Opera Company's production of Donizetti's Lucia di Lammermoor next year. As curtain time approached in London, $5.60 seats were fetching $98 on the black market, and $30 boxes were going for $280. Shipping Magnate Aristotle Onassis, realizing that the occasion was a great night for the Greeks (Callas, Designer John Tsarouchis, Stage Director Alexis Minotis, not to mention Euripides), desperately placed ads in the London Times agony...
...caged lioness. Callas took twelve curtain calls, earned, mighty critical bravos ("terrifying," "elemental," "chilling") for a superb dramatic display. As for her voice, critics as usual found it uneven; the Daily Telegraph judged it "disappointingly small and lacking in resonance." But without the Callas dramatic presence, critics agreed, Medea would have been what Cherubini predicted in 1815: "Too severe for English tastes...
...monstrous stage mother ever seen on stage. Gypsy is inspired by Gypsy Rose Lee's autobiography, but Ecdysiast Lee remembered Mama with the same refined, opera-length-glove finesse that she brought to her stripping. Mama played by Merman is forbiddingly, tiresomely brassy, a kind of Orpheum-circuit Medea. At curtain's rise, Mama Rose has already devoured three unshowbusinesslike husbands and is panting to staff the vaudeville stages of the early 1920s with child labor, notably her little daughters June (Actress June Havoc in later life) and Louise (Gypsy). What follows is a kind of Dante...
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...