Change of Diet

I got plenty o' nuttin'

And nuttin's plenty for me . . .

For an ambitious singer who got his start 14 years ago (as Porgy in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess) with nuttin' very big except a rich, rangy baritone voice, tall, handsome Todd Duncan was doing all right. At 46, with only a few grey hairs in his head, he could lean back with a satisfied smile and say: "I've got a nice house, a good wife, a fine son, and a brand new grandson. I know where I'm going. I can tell you where I'll be right up to 1951."

Last week, Baritone Duncan knew where he was, all right: in Australia. After the fourth of 30 scheduled concerts there, he was acclaimed in Melbourne as "an artist and a singer, both in the absolute sense." Since the war, only one artist--John Charles Thomas--had drawn bigger crowds. But Baritone Duncan was no longer so sure where he was going.

He had given up the stage after singing Porgy all over the world, about 1,200 times in all. After eight years of it, he had told his manager: "Now I must move away from Porgy before I get tagged."

When he first tried to sing in white tie & tails instead of costume (in 1943), he could get only 26 dates in the U.S. "Everywhere, everybody would say 'Oh, sure, we want Duncan--but not in concert. He's a man from the stage. Let's have him in Porgy or Emperor Jones or something like that.' " But he made the break, got European and U.S. audiences alike to listen to his German lieder. He decided that concerts were his meat.

But the proposition Baritone Duncan had heard over a radio-telephone from Manhattan last week seemed too tempting to pass up: the lead in the stage adaptation of Alan Paton's novel, Cry the Beloved Country (TIME, March 8, 1948). Said Duncan: "The role [of Stephen, a Negro Anglican minister] has everything [and] it handles the racial problem bravely, but without rancor or ugliness . . . the kind of role I have been dreaming of since 1935."

At week's end, after wrestling with his soul and his manager (over shortening his Australian tour) and discussing it into the night with his wife Gladys, Baritone Duncan was anxious to go back to costume and grease paint, again.

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