Word: melchiors
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Metropolitan Opera (Sat. 2 p.m., ABC). Tristan und Isolde, with Helen Traubel and Lauritz Melchior...
Luxury Liner (MGM) floats Metro's musical stock company in a welter of romantic complications which could be followed only with a navigation chart. The tangles are slowly and rather painfully unsnarled to the accompaniment of songs by Lauritz Melchior, Marina Koshetz and young Jane Powell, who is expected to carry the burden of a clumsy plot about a sea captain (George Brent) and his amorous passengers. Miss Powell makes a game try against heavy odds. The handling of Mr. Melchior, who also tries hard, is in the Hollywood tradition: two pan shots of enraptured listeners to every shot...
...wrote Billy, quoting a friend] is like seeing Gone With the Wind with Sydney Greenstreet playing Rhett Butler and Sophie Tucker as Scarlett O'Hara . . .' My suggestion is that we interview the fatsos one by one . . . and suggest they consult a doctor. Of course, great singers like Melchior and Traubel should be kept regardless of heft, but minor singers could be given a year's probation and told to get rid of that candy box under the bed-or else . . . Opera would be a lot more popular in this country if there were a few wolf whistles...
...Melchior, who makes more money in such semi-things as Hollywood musicals than he does at the Met, volunteered to stage some of the operas he knows best-Wagner's Tristan tmd Isolde and part of the Ring Cycle ("ones with not too big a chorus")-with his fellow stars pitching in "on a cooperative basis." If the operas went over, he would try some others. And if he couldn't produce them in the Met, he would do it in a Broadway theater...
Another Lunch. Melchior was not the only one prepared to rescue grand opera. In Manhattan, bustling little Showman Billy Rose, who jazzed-up Bizet in Carmen Jones, got front-page publicity with a proposal that wasn't as bumptious as it at first sounded. Five years ago, Billy had lunched with some Met board members, and made what Board Chairman George A. Sloan now gingerly refers to as "a number of helpful observations which were conveyed to our . . . management." Now Billy was again ready to be the Met's little helper...