Music: Opera for Husbands

“The Italians go to The Barber of Seville five nights a week to enjoy themselves, not to be cultured. Why shouldn’t we?” To answer his own question, George Houston is busily directing a group of unfamed singers, called the American Music Theater, in a small building in a Los Angeles park.

George Houston is a onetime teacher in Rochester’s Eastman School of Music who is currently starred as a horse-opera hero in Pathé’s serial The Lone Rider. (“Those horses bounce the bejesus out of me—I hate ’em.”) But Houston has learned things in Hollywood. He takes grand operas in hand, revamps the stories, alters characters, rewords arias—and of course translates them into English. Rossini’s The Barber of Seville, now in rehearsal, he telescoped from a three-and-a-half to a two-and-a-half-hour opera (including intermissions), put in spoken dialogue, built up the lesson scene between Rosina and the Count by adding comedy lines, changed Dr. Bartolo from a typical Italian buffo character (quavering, senile old man with red putty nose) into a near likeness of Cinemactor Frank Morgan. Dr. Bartolo’s first aria he changed from a scolding song into a Gilbert-&-Sullivanian self-analysis:

I’m a man of great affection,

Though I’m given to bisection.

I am very near perfection—

That’s the way I see myself.

Taking another cue from Hollywood, Houston trains his singing actors to master the delayed timing of gags (known to the profession as “takes and double takes”). Bob Hope is his model. Says Houston: “Our shows come out as plays with music.” And tired businessmen have hailed them as “opera for husbands.”