Music: Look Me Over Once …

General Manager Rudolf Bing, who has already livened up the staid old Metropolitan Opera with an infusion of vitamins, last week gave the Met a shot of champagne—and one of the greatest triumphs of its 67 years. For his third new production of the season, he resurrected that bubbly old favorite, Die Fledermaus, of Johann Strauss (the Younger), which had not been heard at the Met since 1905. As he had with Verdi’s Don Carlo (TIME, Nov. 13), Bing rechristened it with just the right flourish by enlisting some bright new help imported from Broadway for the occasion.

To give Strauss’s 76-year-old Viennese farce of double identities and doubles entendres a shining new face,* he called on Playwright-Director Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin. Lyricist (Inside U.S.A.) and M-G-M Vice President Howard Dietz supplied Kanin’s “free adaptation” with a new English-speaking voice. Designer Rolf Gerard was recruited to repeat his earlier scenic success with Don Carlo; pint-sized Conductor Eugene Ormandy was borrowed from the Philadelphia Orchestra. The only thing not touched: Strauss’s score, which, says Kanin, was “protected like a delicate child.”

Bubbles & Champagne. Director Kanin and Conductor Ormandy, both working for the Met for the first time, could hardly have been more solicitous of their delicate charge. From the minute the gold curtains parted, a white-tie-and-tails audience saw a production that fizzed like dry old champagne.

Whirling through Strauss’s waltz-time score, the Met orchestra never sounded better. As Dr. Falke (Fledermaus), the source of the operetta’s intrigues, suave Baritone John Brownlee sang and acted with aplomb. Dressed to the teeth in a scarlet and white uniform and waving an 18-in. cigarette holder, Mezzo Soprano Risë Stevens brought the house down in her entrance as the bored host, Prince Orlofsky.

Bumps & Grinds. There were a few jarring notes. As the operetta’s dupe, Eisenstein, Wagnerian Tenor Set Svanholm occasionally staggered like a fugitive from Götterdämmerung. Red-haired Soprano Ljuba (Salome) Welitch sometimes overacted her Rosalinda. Antony Tudor’s ballroom ballet was a sour grape. But the singing and acting of the Met’s 25-year-old Coloratura Patrice Munsel (as Adele) made up for all of that. Slim, pretty Patrice twice stopped the whole show cold. Her first show-stopping smash, delivered (with the help of new lyrics by Howard Dietz) with far-from-bashful bumps and grinds:

Look me over once, Look me over twice, Examine the line of my spine.

Make a resumé Of my vertebrae Appraising their rare design . . .

And then to make a recap Go over every kneecap And see if they compare with what belongs to me.

When the curtain was down, the audience gave cast, conductor, director and designer their due. Then they set up a clamor for “Bing, Bing,” until the man they really wanted to thank came out for an embarrassed bow.

*Not its first. It was originally a French play called Le Réveillon (The Awakening), written by sometime Offenbach librettists Henry Meilhac and Ludovic Halévy in 1872, and based on a Berlin comedy of 1851. Strauss set a German adaptation to music two years later. Since then, it has been called, in various productions, A Wonderful Night, Fly-by-Night, The Merry Countess, Champagne Sec, etc., and, in the latest Broadway version (TIME, Nov. 9, 1942), Rosalinda.