Word: medium
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...theatrical groups all too often are, at best, promising. But the newly formed Dunster House Music and Drama Society is an exception. With its production of two operas by Gian-Carlo Menotti, this group has very definitely arrived. From every point of view--singing, acting, staging--The Medium, main feature of the evening, is a superlative theatrical experience. And The Telephone, the curtain-raiser which precedes it, makes a very pleasant comic aperitif...
...description of The Medium as "theatrical" has been chosen with care. Although very decidedly operatic, this work is not an opera in the grand manner. While all dialogue is sung, most of it is in prose, and the music generally serves to underline rather than to support the overall effect. This effect is a somber one, ultimately rising to tragic import...
...story which the opera tells so effectively concerns a fake spiritualist, her young daughter, and a mute boy who acts as their helper in the phony seances. During one such session, the medium discovers to her horror that she does indeed possess supernatural powers. But since she is unable to face the fact she fixes on the boy, blames him for tricking her, and drives him away. He, however, returns unseen, with inevitable tragic results...
...happy endings"-the commentator gets fired. The viewer is left to judge between the newscaster's demand for free expression and the network president's case against giving so much power to one man. In effect, the script gives the reader fresh reason to wonder whether a medium of communication dedicated first to selling things, and also subject to government controls, can be expected ever to achieve full power to discuss and to inform...
...heroine (Lauren Bacall) is a big-city career type who thinks she can run a business (designing clothes) in the daytime and a man (Gregory Peck) at night. This is O.K. with Peck, a fellow who seems to require nothing in life but steaks medium and ear lobes raw, but his wife's high-fashion friends get on his nerves. She replies that his low-life buddies get on her nerves too. Big fight. She wins it easily by invoking the old Hollywood rule of inverse virginity. When she proves that he had another bitch before...