Music: Four Saints and Mr. Thomson

A Manhattan audience, looking unseasonably plushy, last week cooed and clapped its way through the revival of a cockeyed opera—Four Saints in Three Acts. The author of its words, expatriate Gertrude Stein, is still expatriate in Occupied France. The author of its music, Expatriate Virgil Thomson, now repatriated in Manhattan, supervised the second showing.

At the original production (1934) in Hartford, Conn., people actually wept at the Cellophane scenery, the lovely costumes, the adroit stage business, and Harlem Negroes singing Miss Stein's screwball words about St. Therese, St. Ignatius, some 30 other...