Red Tape

With his hit shows The Medium and The Telephone (TIME, June 30, 1947), Gian-Carlo Menotti had already proved that he could sell pocket-sized opera to Broadway. Last week a first-night Broadway audience bought his first full three-acter, The Consul, and bravoed for more.

Menotti, a lean, dark-eyed, hungry-looking man of 38, got the idea for his new opera from reading about a refugee who committed suicide when she was turned down for a visa. Says Menotti: "I know we must have some bureaucracy . . . but I cannot abide little people who, given a little power, wield it inflexibly and cruelly."

Menotti stretched his libretto and music around a situation of almost completely unrelieved pathos and tragedy. His heroine, Magda Sorel (Soprano Patricia Neway), applies for a visa to join her resistance-leader husband, who has been hounded out of his unnamed country by the secret police. "The Consul" himself never appears; his secretary chants a bored refrain to all comers:

Your name is a number,

Your story's a case,

Your need a request.

Your hopes will be filed.

Come back next week.

Caught between red tape and secret police, the frantic Magda eventually turns on the gas in frustration and despair.

The Menotti score, composed for small orchestra (25 pieces), was always distinctive if not always distinguished. As in The Medium, Menotti proved himself a master at writing Puccini-like melodrama and composing melody with Puccini-like appeal. His hair-raising stage directions--touches such as the smashing of a window-pane--startled listeners more than once. And he had not lost any of his flair for the macabre: in one scene, a magician hypnotizes his fellow visa-seekers, commands them into an eerie waltz in the consulate office. In Magda's dying dream, the same characters dance again in coffin clothes.

Composer Menotti seemed to have brought off his biggest hit yet and in the process to have secured his title as the most successful opera composer at work in the U.S. today. By week's end, the balcony of Broadway's Ethel Barrymore Theatre was already sold out through August. He had also brought up a new voice. Menotti-veteran Marie (The Medium) Powers, contralto, got her due from the audience for her moving performance as the resistance leader's mother. But it was tall, dark, Brooklyn-born Soprano Neway whose powerful denunciation aria in the second act stopped the show. When the curtain came down the new Broadway opera had to share the cheers with a new Broadway star.

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