Word: stage
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...opera composer himself (Penelope, School for Wives), Liebermann commissions two new operas a year, lets producers and directors follow their own imaginative flights. Currently, two new productions - a brilliant revival of Mozart's The Magic Flute and the premiere of Gian Carlo Menotti's first major stage work in five years - are proving the wisdom of such artistic generosity...
Elfin and Chinese. The Mozart was assigned to Peter Ustinov. Directing a full-length opera for the first time, he tackled The Magic Flute with warnings ringing in his ears. "Some pointed out that it was the most difficult opera of all to stage," said Ustinov. Their point was well taken, since The Magic Flute is a stylistic hodgepodge: there are dazzling coloratura arias, sunny folk songs and slapstick scenes. It is a curious melange, and the fact that it is based on a solemn Masonic morality play only adds to the confusion...
...settled on an approach that he compared to Chinese theater. "In the Chinese theater, a man crosses a river without there being a river on the stage," he says. "A work like The Magic Flute should lead everyone to the depth of his own temperament, and so I prefer to have the public imagine the river." There is no river to imagine in Ustinov's Magic Flute, but there is much else. Sarastro's temple of wisdom is suggested by four golden columns and a clear egg-yolk backdrop rather than the usual bombastic temple architecture. The other...
Along the way, Rachel falls in with a crooked straight man (Jason Robards) and a doleful comic (Norman Wisdom). The casting could not be bettered., Robards' crumpled countenance and larcenous glint make him the quintessential backstage villain. Wisdom, long a British stage star, recalls Keaton in his split-second spills and deadpan pantomime...
Bertolt Brecht had a touching Teutonic faith in the power of the blow to instruct. Almost all his dramas are displays of belligerent didacticism. The stage was his prize ring. The audience was his sparring partner. There he was-"poor B.B.," as he always liked to think of himself-lashing out with a bruising ideological left to the midriff, jolting the playgoer with some brisk truism...