Word: pinza
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...musical play" in which story moves on equal terms with song, while dancing is shunned and spectacle virtually banished. Story means, for the most part, a romance between "Knucklehead Nellie" (Mary Martin), an appealing Navy nurse from Little Rock, Ark., and a middle-aged Pacific-island French planter (Ezio Pinza). The nurse loves the planter but almost loses him, first to her Southern prejudices when she finds he has lived openly with a native woman and sired two children, then to the hazards of war. There is a similar but sadder subplot in which Boy Meets Native Girl and breaks...
...with nimble skill, while the Jo Mielziner sets never jam the flow. As the little knucklehead, Mary Martin gives the performance of her career. She merges a gift for comedy with a delightful personality; she sings well, and turns out ballads even better. As the planter, Metropolitan Opera Basso Pinza proves himself an excellent Broadway performer. He has, beyond that, the kind of voice that show business is lucky enough to acquire once or twice in a generation. The whole supporting cast is good, particularly Myron McCormick as an unregimented Seabee...
After 23 years in 76 roles at the Met, Basso Ezio Pinza, 56, opened in New Haven in his first musical, Broadway-bound South Pacific. His role: an island planter. Busy taking bows, he took time to say "au revoir and perhaps goodbye" to opera. "I am crazy to get into a straight play," he told an interviewer. "... I would have to have a strong part, a great lover or some other really dramatic role, and I think I would be good...
...production is wonderful--fast and beautiful and marvelously ingenious. And so is the supporting cast, especially Myron McCormick as Luther and Betta St. John as Liat. And so is Ezio Pinza, whose voice is such a miracle that it probably does not matter that the words he lavishes it on cannot be understood...
...Metropolitan Opera's brawny glamor boy, Basso Ezio Pinza, who has long had his eye on Hollywood,* took a step in that direction: he announced that he would play the lead in Rodgers & Hammerstein's new Broadway musical next winter...