Word: ra
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...Manon is a French opera of more refined and delicate charms than Puccini's booming, Italianate Manon Lescaut, although both are based on the same Abbé Prevost novel. It is a big opera, but for best effect it needs a production with the intimacy of opéra comique-one reason it has never been much more than a singers' showpiece at the Metropolitan (last performance: 1948). Last week, as the only new production of the New York City Opera's spring season, Massenet's Manon got the kind of performance it calls...
...Boom-ta-ra-ta-ra-ra, ye housewives, don't you sigh...
...script, huffing & puffing to find excuses for these athletic feats, tells an opéra-bouffe story involving Lancaster's "free men of the mountains," a foreign tyrant (Frank Allenby), and a fair lady (Virginia Mayo). Happily, their contrived heroics are spiked with some unconscious comedy...
Serge Lifar is a dancer who likes more than a moderate share of applause. He hardly minds at all when he is quoted as saying, "I was magnificent." Often, at performances of his Paris Opéra Ballet, curtain bows run into the dozens-long after a good part of the audience has already left the hall. So when Russian-born Ballet Master Lifar brought his Opéra Ballet to Manhattan in 1948, and was greeted by a picket line denouncing him as a collaborationist,* he could hardly contain his indignation. Last week, in Paris, it looked...
...film places the action in a sort of opéra-bouffe Dogpatch in central Europe, in Napoleonic times. Kaye is not the knave of Gogol's play but a good-hearted rube. A half-starved outcast from a medicine show, he is mistaken by the crooked mayor (Gene Lockhart) and his henchmen-relatives for Napoleon's feared inspector general traveling incognito. Then, hardly grown into his splendid Techncolored uniform and the hungry affections of the mayor's wife (Elsa Lanchester), Kaye becomes a cat's-paw and fall guy for the scoundrelly medicine-show boss...