The Play

...American-born and American-trained, she knows no equal today on the operatic stage, and once more she proved it in this forgotten opera of Giuseppe Verdi...

...Thus when the production at last emerges from the gently guiding hands of Miss King and Miss Coit, it is, so far as is humanly possible, the work of the children themselves...

...He has given us up to the present date revivals of The Girl of the Golden West, Don Giovanni, and Luisa Miller...

...The school is unique, in that it does not seek to train actors...

...To the last two generations of American opera-goers, Luisa Miller has been but a name, and it probably would have remained a name save for the desire of Mr...

...Lynn Fontanne does admirably in the singularly difficult (because not obviously difficult) part of Lord's wife...

...Their perfect poise, clear diction and earnest enthusiasm merit individual as well as group praise...

...The attainment is so incommensurate with the dream that it never seems like an attainment at all...

...Tempest-in the King-Coit Fashion SINCE 1924, the winter holiday season has always been the signal for a delicious event-the annual play of the children of the King-Coit school...

...This deprives it of all the tragic (universal) proportions which so plainly lie within Mr...

...As the drama begins to take shape, the original lines are gradually substituted-or as many of them as fit into the scheme of an abbreviated version...

...More's the pity that with so much good writing, good acting and good staging, the material of the play should be so commonplace and so far beneath its theme and subtly penetrating characterization...

...At the same time, the children are encouraged to make drawings of costumes and scenes, giving free play to their native imagery...

...Alfred Lunt plays the part of Lord to the hilt of its possibilities-showing, as he has so often before, his uncanny understanding of the neurotic type...

...The study of character is befogged at every turn by mediocre situations...

...Behrman's fine mental analysis of the egotist seems wasted...

...The best of these drawings form the basis for the final stage sets adopted...

...Then they are encouraged to give it dramatic form with improvised lines of their own...

...This year, for the first time in many seasons, he has apparently accepted this fact, and turned only to the past...

...This year Miss Coit and Miss King selected Shakespeare's Tempest as a fertile playground for childish imagination...

...The first-named was scarcely worth revival, except to give Madame Jeritza a new role, but Don Giovanni made ample atonement, despite the enforced absence from the part of Donna Anna of Rosa Ponselle...

...In the orchestra especially Verdi infused a passion which still is telling, a passion in which we can hear Verdi growing out of the merely mellifluous spirit of the operatic writers of his youth into the dramatic period of his masterpieces...

...But in the end it betrays him-and doubly...

...The present version of The Tempest lacks something of the quaint and stark simplicity which distinguished Aucassin and Nicolete, and is strangely reminiscent of the Reinhardt method in Midsummer Night's Dream...

...Behrman found a character who embodied many universal traits-particularly that trace of dual personality which afflicts nearly every sensitive or volatile nature...

...Philip Moeller's direction is adroit and convincing...

...Besides Miss Ponselle's in the title part, excellent performances were given by Mr...

...It is the kind of performance that bears you back to days of unfettered dreams...

...On the other hand, the technical structure of Meteor is sufficiently good to make it arrest passing attention, and Alfred Lunt endows the character of Lord with just enough fire, intensity and neurotic interest to give him the fleeting illusion of reality...

...That is why the play is anything but dull while you are watching it...

...Of course this belief in the idea of himself compensates for a real inner terror of facing life with only the average equipment of other men...

...But Raphael Lord of Meteor, though obviously patterned after such great historical egotists as Napoleon, never ascends beyond the level of the successful stock promoter...

...Lauri-Volpi as the hero, Mr...

...Yet the audience at the opening performance was stirred by the old work in no uncertain manner...

...That Miss Ponselle is a lyric rather than a truly dramatic soprano makes no difference...

...The proportions between Lord's megalomania and his background are never balanced well enough to create the illusion of real importance...

...Grenville Vernon...

...De Luca as Luisa's father...

...Luis a Miller OF RECENT years the Metropolitan Opera Company has been more successful in excavating than in building -its revivals have been more stimulating than its novelties...

...But I defy anyone to effect a more entrancing picture-the stylized grace of the child actors, the sweeping fancy of the turreted settings, the ethereal magic of the costumes...

...On the production the Metropolitan lavished its best...

...but in doing so, he selects a background which his hero can completely dominate-a small empire, but an empire none the less...

...THE PLAY By RICHARD DANA SKINNER Meteor METEOR, by S. N. Behrman (author of The Second Man) is an excellent example of the type of play that provides a vivid impression at the moment of the performance but creates no lasting memories...

...Serafin gave his usual satisfactory performance in the conductor's stand...

...Its general manager, Mr...

...At the Guild Theatre...

...Whatever lack of power there may be in her upper tones is compensated for by their exquisite purity, while the richness, warmth and evenness of her lower and middle voice have been unparalleled since the days of Emma Calve...

...And above all Miss Ponselle has become a consummate artist...

...He is the man who lives, breathes and finds his superabundant energy in a grandiose dream of himself-the man who mistakes his good intuition for an infallible instinct, his normal energy for daemonic power, and coincidence for his lucky star...

...Happily by the time Luisa Miller arrived, Miss Ponselle had recovered, and once again the greatest soprano voice of modern times thrilled a delighted audience...

...Gatti-Casazza, has done the best he could to unearth modern masterpieces, and the fact that he has failed probably simply means that modern masterpieces are not being written...

...Behrman's own conception...

...So powerful is the dream that it actually leads him to achievements which would otherwise be impossible...

...It merely tries to develop, through acting, drawing, painting and dancing a keen sense of dramatic art in children from seven to fourteen...

...He remains the tortured egotist to the last-even if it means the loss of his wife and all human friendship...

...I wish that the program would tell us the names of the understanding small performers...

...To illustrate this point by a contrasting example: O'Neill tackles the same general problem in Emperor Jones...

...Gatti-Casazza to find a new part for Miss Ponselle...

...Then, when he at last discovers that the premonition can be false, he is forced, in an agony, to construct another dream to take the place of the shattered one...

...Luisa Miller is, of course, old fashioned, but it is none the less vital...

...In the pages of Luisa Miller there is more than a hint of Traviata...

...If, hitherto, he has relied too much on his "gift"-that is, on something almost outside of himself-from now on he must believe equally in his own character and ability...

...As an individual character study, Lord is an undue exaggeration (undue, as I have explained, because of disproportionate background) of a perfectly recognizable and always interesting type...

...The reason, in the present instance, is that the herp, intended to be a character of absorbing special interest, never attains proportions, and never moves in a background, which lift him to universal significance...

...But in the realm of finance and promotion, the play never makes his dominance convincing...

...The method of the school is to make the children responsible for practically every detail of the production...

...The result is a drama which catches universal values...

...In the weakling who became the central figure of The Second Man, Mr...

...I can only say that on New Year's afternoon a lovely Miranda, a wise Prospero, an enamored Ferdinand, a crabbed Caliban, a boisterous Stephano and a quaint Trinculo utterly captured my heart-which was also stirred by the lovely voice and face of a little mermaid, awash in the waves...

...If ever a drama is written around Nietzsche, Lunt will play the part of that pathetic madman to an immortal pitch...

...The result, whether one be in an indulgent or in a definitely critical mood, is often quite magical...

...Behrman's Raphael Lord is also an egotist of empire, but his playground is merely a sort of backyard to the castle and estate of finance...

...First, the premonition he always enjoys of coming events tortures him-the essential evil consequence of piercing beyond the veil of human limitations...

...First they are told the story of the play...

...The introduction of a legendary South American republic in which he finds-oil, and which his financial power is supposed to control, is a meagre off-stage substitute for a real situation at hand with which he and his ego must come to grips...

...If set in the right proportions, this might easily be a fascinating study...

...If, for example, Lord had made himself the president and czar of a university, or of a great corporation...

...That Aida, and Otello, and Falstaff were still far under the horizon is true, but in Luisa Miller, Verdi is on the road to them...

...Thus a great deal of Mr...

...But the Metropolitan can scarcely be blamed for this...

...In spite of his grandiose dreams, he remains, even at the crest of his career, a comparatively small frog in a very large pond...

...Ludikar as the villainous Worm, and Mr...