On a rain-dashed afternoon in the spring of 1947 a lean, tense-looking man in his mid-30s walked into Manhattan's Edison Hotel, just off Broadway, and registered for a room. He specified that it must overlook 47th Street. Once upstairs, he walked quickly to the window, looked down on the street below, satisfied himself that the view was right, then turned away and began to pace the floor, chainsmoking cigarettes. Finally he settled down to a vigil at the window. With alert brown eyes he watched the bustling traffic on the sidewalks. How many of the passers-by would stop at the Ethel Barrymore Theater across the street? How many, once they stopped, would buy tickets for the show that had just opened?
Gian-Carlo Menotti had good reason for counting every patron. For production in the close academic air of Columbia University, he had composed a compact little two-act opera called The Medium, and it had gone on Broadway. It was a grim and eerie story of an old faker who finally, at one of her seances, feels the touch of one of the spirits she has pretended to reach for so many years, and consequently goes mad. It was hardly a cheery subject; moreover, it was all 'opera. Every line and word was sung, and its music yielded nothing at all to Broadway's cotton-candy musical tradition.
Yet Composer Menotti had let two Broadway neophytes named Chandler Cowles and Efrem Zimbalist Jr., both 28, convince him that they could make The Medium a success on the Main Stem.
Spread the Word. From his hotel window Menotti saw few patrons; the advance sale for The Medium (and for a short Menotti curtain raiser called The Telephone) came to just $47. For the first few weeks of the run most of the audience could have been taken home each night in a Broadway bus. And many of them turned out to be just the same old admirers coming back again.
But the critics, who had generally cheered The Medium and The Telephone, were busy with more stories of the new operas, and so were the faithful in Menotti's audience. The word spread: Menotti had taken the grand airs out of opera, brought to it the realism and immediacy of the 20th Century theater. And, best of all, his operas were in English and the plain playgoer could understand every word.
For the last two months of the seven-month run, the Barrymore had a sellout.
Even La Sea la. Last week, Italian-born Composer Menotti's days of counting the customers seemed to be over, and that was a prospect that Menotti was regarding with considerable concern. A few days after his new opera, The Consul, opened on Broadway (TIME, March 27), he phoned Producer Cowles and said in a subdued voice: "Well, I guess we have a success on our hands. Now is when we must be humble."
The Consul, Menotti's first three-acter, has a plot that is just as drab as The Medium's: the story of a desperate woman in a police state who commits suicide when her last attempt to get a visa fails. It is longer and not so compact, but it packs more than The Medium's share of melodramatic punch. It opened on Broadway with a $100,000 advance sale; by last week all seats were sold out through June.