Word: deviled
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...Manhattan last week the American Lyric Theatre entered the second week of its debutante season. First week, it had launched the folksy opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster, by Douglas Moore and Stephen Vincent Benet. This it followed with an operetta based upon Stephen Foster tunes, Susanna Don't You Cry, which, for all its musical charm and its flashy mounting by Robert Edmond Jones, had a plot which died of Southern molassitude. The Lyric Theatre next put on an evening of dancing by Lincoln Kirstein's Ballet Caravan-an uninspired Air and Variations to music by Bach...
...Indianapolis druggist Lillys, had backed it to the tune of $50,000. Last week, just about the time the mutual backscratching was over, the Lyric Theatre noticed it had three flops on its hands. It closed its season after a dozen performances, announced it would send The Devil on the road in the autumn, open a second season with some new tries...
Though 16 efforts at native opera have had premieres at Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House, horse operas (movie Westerns) remain preeminently the American taste. U. S. composers keep at it, however, and last week a new U. S. opera, The Devil and Daniel Webster, was presented at Manhattan's Martin Beck Theatre. Librettist: Poet Stephen Vincent Benét. Composer: Douglas Moore. Producer: Robert Edmond Jones...
...kind of folksy Faustus, Mr. Benet's fable relates how a New Hampshire farmer, in return for ten years of prosperity, sold his soul to the devil. To his wedding in 1841 come Secretary of State Daniel Webster (to kiss the bride) and the Devil (to have his due). Neighbor Webster, the great lawyer, defends Farmer Stone before a special jury of villains out of Hell and U. S. history, wins an acquittal by touching their memories of Freedom...
...spoken instead of sung, for his generally apt orchestration and unobtrusive transitions. Like Poet Benet's verses, the music is homespun to a turn. Far less spontaneous and intense than The Cradle Will Rock (TIME June 28,1937), No. 1 operatic experiment with topical U. S. material, The Devil and Daniel Webster is well staged and occasionally rises above self-conscious Americanism...