When Marie Powers was five, an opera singer asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. Said Marie: "I want to be fat, jolly and an opera singer like you." Today, fortyish, buxom Marie Powers is doing what was once considered impossible: making opera go over on Broadway.
She is the star in Gian-Carlo Menotti's eerie chamber opera, The Medium. When Menotti's modest opera was first tried out last season it got warm but not glowing reviews (TIME, May 20, 1946). On a gamble, its composer put it on Broadway in May of this year, hoped it would run two weeks. It has been running ever since, and last week, for the third time, its run was extended. Marie's portrayal of the opera's title character has had a lot to do with The Medium's success. She is by no means the world's greatest contralto, but she has what better contraltos often lack, a superb dramatic skill.
Arturo Toscanini, whose Broadway appearances are few, has been three times to see The Medium, and its frivolous companion piece, The Telephone.* When Tallulah Bankhead saw The Medium, she went backstage, dramatically fell on her knees before Marie, and exclaimed: "I have been moved by three performances in my lifetime: John Barrymore in Hamlet, Jeanne Eagels in Rain, and you." For the entire cast of six she had a typical Tallulu: "This is the only play . . . that has thrilled my soul and chilled my guts."
Home with 28¢. Broadwayites found themselves asking: Where has Marie Powers been all our lives? The answer is that she has been out of the country most of the years since she left home in Mt. Carmel, Pa. at 17, to study singing in Italy. In Milan she sneaked into a friend's audition by Toscanini, got a job in La Scala for herself. She sang all over Europe, capably but not gloriously, and married an Italian nobleman. Her husband died just before the war, and she returned to the U.S. with 28¢ in her purse. She was singing road-company opera in Seattle when a friend of Menotti's heard her, sent her to the composer. Said Menotti: "As soon as Marie began to sing, I knew she was the Madame Flora I was looking for. It wasn't just her voice or her acting; it was her electrifying vitality."
Rehearsal on Skates. A gusty woman who has been known to roller skate from her midtown club to the theater for rehearsals, Marie sits in absolute quiet for half an hour before each show to store up enough intensity to project the sinister malevolence of Madame Flora across the footlights. A Roman Catholic, she solemnly says "thank you" to the statuette of the Madonna on the stage when the final curtain is down. Says she: "I am having the time of my life. Each night I dedicate the performance to somebody—a friend, my dead husband. Then I think of the woman in the audience who is tired and who had to get a sitter to be able to come. Why shouldn't I give my best?"
*Toscanini took a garrulous lady friend to see The Telephone, which concerns a woman who spends so much time gabbling on the phone that she wouldn't listen to a proposal. Toscanini, in a waggish mood, got Menotti to substitute the friend's phone number for the phony number usually used in the opera.