By Steven Suskin
29 Oct 2000

Imagine a musical melodrama chock full of ghosts, chills, seances, supernatural doings, and even a grisly onstage murder. Sounds commercial, no? Only in this case I'm afraid I'm talking about an opera.

And not a "Broadway opera," punctuated with knockout show tunes like "It Ain't Necessarily So" or "Standing on the Corner Watching All the Girls Go By." A real opera, like they sing in opera houses, only in English so you can understand what all the fuss is about. Gian-Carlo Menotti's The Medium was commissioned by Columbia University and first produced at their Brander Matthews Theatre for five performances in May 1946.

A revised version of the piece — paired with Menotti's one-act comic operetta The Telephone as curtain-raiser - was mounted the following February for four performances at the Heckscher Theatre (at Fifth Avenue and 104th Street, now the home of El Museo del Barrio). It was produced by Ballet Society — George Balanchine's company, which soon changed its name to the New York City Ballet - and met such praise that it transferred to the Ethel Barrymore on May 1, 1947 for an impressive 211 performances. (Was this the first transfer ever of a musical from off-Broadway?)

The Medium only has a few "songs," if you will, but it is overloaded with haunting melody. Some of it is absolutely rhapsodic, like the section in which the child Monica translates the pantomimed "speech" of the mute gypsy boy — and determines that he is professing his love for her ("Monica, Monica, can't you see"). Or the heartbreaking Doodly section of the seance ("Doodly, Doodly, are you happy?"). Or the passage in which the civilians - informed by the medium that the seance was phony - nevertheless insist that the apparitions were real ("Not to know my own daughter's voice"). The material for Madame Flora, the medium of the title, is appropriately blood-curdling; her final solo, "Afraid," is mighty grisly with its "little grotesque children drained white by the voraciousness of filth." This lady makes Sondheim's cannibalistic Mrs. Lovett look like someone's sweet old aunt who knits sweaters for birthday gifts that never fit. Marie Powers is riveting in the role, someone you wouldn't want to meet in a dark alley or even in a brightly-sunlit plaza in front of police headquarters.

The Medium is more opera than musical theatre, perhaps. It is highly theatrical, though, and highly effective, and packed with memorable music. It ran six months at the Barrymore, so I've always accepted it as Broadway. Menotti wrote it, orchestrated it, and directed it. The Medium was the first of his four operas to play Broadway, through 1958; two of them, The Consul and The Saint of Bleecker Street, both won Pulitzers (for music) and N.Y. Drama Critics Circle Awards (for best musical). The Medium won a Tony Award for Horace Armistead's set - the first Tony given in that category, by the way.

The Medium is one of those long out-of-print cast albums that one never expected to find on CD. Columbia Records recorded it; as far as I can tell, it was only the second cast album produced by Goddard Leiberson (according to whom it was the first American opera to be recorded in its entirety.) The CD has been released by Pearl, a British label that specializes in "vintage" recordings. There is no licensing credit given to Columbia, which makes me wonder if this is an authorized release. The sound quality is so good, though, that I wonder if Pearl didn't somehow get ahold of the original masters. (The liner notes list explicit session and take numbers, which implies that maybe they did.) I don't suppose Sony was likely to get to The Medium, though - how commercial can it possibly be? - and I'm thrilled that someone has bothered to do it after all these years of having to get up out of my chair at a critical moment of the seance to turn from side two to side three. Columbia/Sony also has in its archives the three-LP set of Marc Blitzstein's Regina (from Lillian Hellman's The Little Foxes). This is a fine recording of an important and influential piece of American music theatre. Now that we have The Medium in our hands, let us hope that the Columbia Regina will someday come along, too.

Also included on Pearl's two-CD set is The Telephone, which is amusing (for only a couple of listenings, though); selections from a sonically-poor radio transcription of Menotti's early opera Amelia Al Ballo; and the ballet Sebastian. But the treasure here is The Medium. If emotionally-raging Grand Guignol musical theatre is to your taste, you might well find it riveting.

-- Steven Suskin, author of the new Third Edition of "Show Tunes" (from Oxford University Press) and the "Opening Night on Broadway" books. Prior ON THE RECORD columns can be accessed in the Features section along the left-hand side of the screen. He can be reached by E-mail at Ssuskin@aol.com