Word: tenoritis
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When the curtain went up on LaBohème that night in Philadelphia's Academy of Music, Tenor Caruso & Co. found that wintry weather had cut their audience to fewer than 200. So they decided to do La Bohème up a little differently...
This week, on CBS's We the People program, U.S. music-lovers were to hear for the first time how the great tenor sounded as a great basso. For, pleased with his prank, Caruso had made a recording a few weeks later. Only six prints had been run off and Caruso had ordered the master copy destroyed. Said he: "I don't want to spoil the bass business." But one of the prints had been preserved by Dr. Mario Marafioti, onetime Met physician and friend of Caruso, and Narrator Wally (Voices That Live) Butterworth had persuaded...
...usual, Pasternak begins with a pretty soprano (Kathryn Grayson) warbling an aria. An itinerant celebrity (Jose Iturbi) is beating the fake rosebushes for young opera stars. Tunneling into this setup is a manly young truck driver (Mario Lanza) who has just the bouncing good looks and tenor voice to team up with the soprano...
...lavishly doubled or tripled. There are two prodigies and two frustrated opera-singer parents kicking them up to stardom, two comics (Jules Munshin and Keenan Wynn) and two imperturbable renegades from the fine arts (Ethel Barrymore and Jose Iturbi). Among the players, only Thomas Gomez (whose portrait of a tenor warming up his tonsils spoofs both tenor and script) seems to be having any fun in the machine comedy...
...pleasant surprise in That Midnight Kiss is Mario Lanza, a young (27) tenor with the spry, nonsensical air of a chipmunk and an Americanized-Caruso voice which gives style and seriousness to the whole production. His least appealing quality, which Metro will apparently exploit for some ten musicals, is the smily, complacent bounce which places him in Hollywood's long list of boys who rouse the maternal instinct...