For ten long years Marcel Prawy, 44, a Vienna-born American, has been a man with a mission. He has yearned to popularize the American musical comedy in Vienna, birthplace and home of the op eretta. But conservative musical Vienna orchestrated (tutti) a violent campaign against Prawy's dream. Composers, academicians and critics decried (sostenuto e fortissimo) the American musicomedy as a purveyor of cheap, foreign, bad music.
Battered but unbowed, Prawy persisted. Finally the state-subsidized Volksoper gave Prawy the downbeat. He picked a 1949 Broadway hit, Kiss Me, Kate.
Brass Bite. Prawy began by putting Sam and Bella Spewack's slangy, sprightly spoof of Shakespeare and show business into sprightly, slangy German. Then, to give the Cole Porter score bite, he put an edge on the staid Volksoper orchestra in the form of a dozen Viennese axmen, most of whom cut up in brass. To keep the musicians jumping, he imported Conductor Julius Rudel of Manhattan's City Opera Co. He also imported his key principals from the U.S.: handsome Brenda Lewis of the Metropolitan Opera (Kate), and two relative unknowns, both Negroes, Olive Moorefield (Bianca) and Hubert Dilworth (Paul). Perhaps most revolutionary of all at the Volksoper, where talent often plays second fiddle to length of service, Prawy hand-picked 20 beauties for his chorus and excused the theater's other 60 choristers. After that all Prawy had to do, by sheer dictatorial force, was to prevent the Austrian singers from ad-libbing about Vienna weather, Austrian taxes or anything else they might think funny in the middle of a song.
Last week Prawy at last was ready—and old Vienna got its first American musicomedy. Before the opening, Vienna's Arbeiterzeitung ran an article protesting "Don't Kiss Me, Kate," and the experts agreed that poor Katharine the Shrew was certain to fall on her face.
Inspired Import. In Vienna people arrive fashionably late at the theater, and operettas hold off their big numbers for the end. What worried Prawy was Kate's big ballet scene, which opens the show. This scene alone, he felt, might mean success or failure. As the scene ended on opening night, there was dead silence. Prawy, an old hand at the claque game, clapped once—and started five minutes of thunderous applause. After that, Kate was in. The musicians swung as lightly as if they had not been raised in three-quarter time; the American principals sang in pleasingly accented German.
Next day the Arbeiterzeitung review pleaded "Do Kiss Me, Kate." The Wochenpresse added "Kiss Me Very Long, Kate." Vienna's most eminent literary critic, Oskar Maurus Fontana, proclaimed on the radio: "Not since Offenbach . . . has Vienna seen such an inspired foreign product." Cole Porter was hailed as the "Lehar of America," and at week's end Kate was playing to packed houses at prices 25% above the Volksoper norm.
Happily counting the receipts, Volksoper officials now plan to produce two American musicals a year. Next attractions: Brigadoon and Wonderful Town.