Music: Opera Boffola

The scene is the ruins of Athens, among which a few gods and goddesses still philander alongside the tourists. Orpheus, a hearts-and-flowers fiddler, plots with Pluto to get rid of his wife Eurydice, although she is really very fetching in her tight red pedal pushers. While Pluto and “Eury,” as she is known to her friends, take off for a tryst in hell, trouble develops on Olympus, where an amorous Jupiter is losing the loyalty of his court (everybody is tired of that endless nectar and ambrosia diet); so he agrees to cheer up the gods by a mass junket to the gayer clime of Hades and, incidentally, to rescue Eurydice. In hell, confusion is confounded by folderol, but finally—with the help of what is probably the fieriest cancan ever written—everyone agrees on a highly satisfactory and immoral solution.

So goes Orpheus in the Underworld, Jacques Offenbach’s delightful spoof of Greek mythology, presented in English by the New York City Opera Company last week. The stylishly scant scenery (including a tricky, tilted revolving stage) is handsome; the staging is often funny; and the music is as charming as it was 100 years ago. Under the firm and concise direction of Vienna-born Erich Leinsdorf, 44, who left the Rochester Philharmonic to become the City Center’s new musical director, the brilliant score is beautifully played. The trouble with Orpheus is its new libretto, which seemed determined to turn this charming opera buffa into a crude opera boffola.

The book follows the original’s satiric story line but kills its spirit by relentless pursuit of the obvious gag, the single entendre, the rhyme-at-any-cost; e.g., “The air is full of your infidelities,” sings Juno. “No? The hell it is,” rhymes Jupiter in one of the better couplets. And so it goes, with garter-Sparta, Hades-ladies, loony-Juny (for Juno), until the elegantly frothy music is almost lost between the heavy text and the embarrassed sighs of the audience. Most remarkable fact of all: the man who managed thus to combine the theatrical naivete of a junior-highschool pageant with the vulgarity of a third-rate burlesque skit is Eric (In Search of Theater) Bentley, 40, Brander Matthews Professor of Dramatic Literature at Columbia University and a leading snob-about-the-theater who argues that there must be theaters for the cultured few, so as to save the “intelligent” drama from commercialism.

Most of the cast seemed infected by the professor’s indiscretions, overdoing the broadest points, throwing away the few finer ones. Sylvia Stahlman (Eurydice) had the prettiest voice, at its best in The Old Time Religion (“Bacchus my king, O let’s be romantic”), and Hiram Sherman (Jupiter) hammed his part happily, right down to losing his hula skirt. Musico-medienne Paula Laurence was the most professional of all as Miss P. (for Public) Opinion, “a vestal virgin with a bachelor’s degree.” Her message: break as many commandments as you please, except for “Thou shalt not be found out.” But the audience easily found out Librettist Bentley, who had broken the supreme stage commandment: “Thou shalt not bore.”