Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Briggs & Briggs is set for the usual rush on music. The classics are expected to comprise 70 percent of the holiday trade, as they did last year, and in deference to this, the window is packed with records of symphony and opera. For those who plan to give someone a television set, the Briggs basement is the place...
...story is about what you would expect in a second-rate comic opera. A proper Bostonian (Sinatra) arrives in Spanish-owned California to take over an inn and a gang of bandits inherited from his father. The rootin'-tootin' father had been bored with innkeeping, but he was a great hand at banditry and kissing the women he robbed. The son is a shaky beanpole who falls off his horse at the drop of a hoof. He is afraid of guns and women, but anxious to see that the inn has plenty of clean sheets and towels...
Goldovsky has completely reworked the plot, made a minor character into the operetta's protagonist, and used production devices more familiar in Hollywood than on an opera stage. The music has been orchestrated, but other than that left pretty much alone. The result of these manipulations is an operetta not only delightful to hear, but excellent theater as well...
...main fault with the "Turk" was not in the performance or the opera itself. It is hardly more than a chamber opera, and in the cavernous wastelands of the Boston Opera House, the small mass of sound produced was pretty well lost. It was hard enough for most of the paying customers to hear the artists, let alone detect any difference subtler than that between a pianissimo and a fortissimo...
...Turk in Italy" is an excellent illustration of Mr. Goldovsky's thesis that good opera must also be good theater. It will be interesting to see how successful he will be with his next production--the better-known Carmen...