Friday, June 22, 2001

SMT on line with ‘Medium,’ ‘Telephone’

By LAURA STEWART
NEWS-JOURNAL FINE ARTS WRITER

There's a point to Seaside Music Theater's pairing two very different Gian Carlo Menotti musical plays -- "The Telephone" and "The Medium."

And it's a very fine, very pointed point. "One -- 'The Telephone' -- is comic relief. We're doing that first, and I think that makes the change into the absolute melodrama of 'The Medium' more powerful," said Lester Malizia, director of the Seaside production that previews Thursday at the Daytona Beach Community College Theater Center.

"Seeing 'The Telephone' first makes 'The Medium' a bigger surprise. Like 'The Turn of the Screw' and 'Rosemary's Baby,' it's a psychological drama," said Malizia, who is also Seaside's general manager.

That's how composer Menotti saw it. The founder of the celebrated Spoleto cultural festivals in Italy and Charleston, S.C., will celebrate his 90th birthday on July 7. The Italian composer began his long and ongoing career with songs written when he was 7, and completed his first opera when he was 11. He entered the Verdi Conservatory at age 12, moving to America and graduating from Philadelphia's Curtis Institute. He went on to win the Pulitzer Prize and New York Drama Critics Circle awards in 1954 for "The Consul," not long after writing "Amahl and the Night Visitors."

Menotti wrote "The Medium" in 1945, not long after the successful premieres of his ballet, "Sebastian," and "Piano Concerto." He completed "The Telephone" soon after finishing "The Medium," which had been commissioned by Columbia University. The latter opened at Columbia's Brander Matthews Theater in New York City on May 8, 1946, and was presented with "The Telephone" for the first time at New York's Center on Dec. 7, 1948, and enjoyed a 40-performance run with Menotti as director.

The same winning combination of a sublimely silly comedy that's followed, startlingly, by an eerily unsettling thriller was revived by Seaside once before, in 1978. But the 2001 take on both will be different. "In 'The Telephone,' we have a wonderful telephone, a very '50s kind of instrument," said Malizia. "There is a jarring shift from that opera into 'The Medium,' but that jar helps make the point, and makes it more surprising; the scariness is part of the excitement. I don't believe in ever lessening the impact.

"We're going for the full Monty," he added. That means the full, sublimely silly wackiness of "The Telephone," a riff on modern manners that's lofted to sheer irony by the contrast between '50s technology and current communications, from e-mail to multi-function mobiles.

In "The Telephone," Lucy (soprano Elizabeth Stanley) is always on the phone; her boyfriend Ben (baritone Joseph Spieldenner) finally sees a way to get her attention, and goes out to a pay phone. He calls, asks her to marry him, and all ends well.

Then the curtain rises on another Menotti mood, as crass con-artist medium Madame Flora (contralto Jane Christeson) holds a seance for couples who have lost their children. When a ghostly hand clutches her neck, she accuses her daughter Monica (soprano Angela Sacco) and her mute assistant Toby (Luke Griswold) of tricking her. Again Madame Flora experiences something she hasn't planned, and her brassy veneer cracks.

That's where the real terror comes in.

"It's a combination of the music and watching a woman who had no conscience as she's seized by the worst fear," said Malizia. "It's sort of like the old 'Twilight Zone.' It's like 'The Turn of the Screw' or 'Rosemary's Baby' -- this is a classic psychological drama. What's really going on here? Is this just Madame Flora's imagination? She's a con woman -- is this one of her clients' dead children getting even?

"Could be," Malizia chuckled, leaving the question open. "Could be ..."