This Day in Opera History (Marc Blitzstein Adaptation of Hellman Drama Opens)

Oct. 31, 1949— Marc Blitzstein's Regina, premiering at Broadway’s 46th Street Theater, represented a cross-section of American musical influences: hymns, blues, foxtrots, ragtime, polkas, and field songs, as if trying to reach a mass audience.

But the masses didn’t turn out for this adaptation of Lillian Hellman’s hit 1939 drama The Little Foxes, about the deforming impact of greed on a woman and her siblings in turn-of-the century Alabama.

In fact, even in an era when quasi-operatic productions were created for Broadway by such ambitious composers as Kurt Weill (Street Scene), Gian Carlo Menotti (The Consul), Leonard Bernstein (Candide), and Frank Loesser (The Most Happy Fella), audiences did not warm to this material, with some attendees even demanding their money back because they were expecting a musical.

Even with a full-page ad in The New York Times signed by Bernstein and 11 other musical and theater luminaries that extolled the virtues of this production, Regina lasted just seven weeks—one-twentieth of the time it took to create this piece of musical theater.

My post from earlier this year, on a 1959 Blitzstein production, Juno, related how that show fell victim to misdirection and miscasting. The problem with Regina was simpler: After much back- and-forth discussion, producer Cheryl Crawford convinced the composer that this show belonged on a musical stage rather than in an opera house.

Blitzstein, longing for the kind of recognition then being given Rodgers and Hammerstein for South Pacific, went along with the idea. It was a mistake.

Some opera purists didn’t appreciate the show’s use of spoken recitative. But the principal cause of the truncated run were fans who, expecting a traditional brassy musical comedy, encountered a brooding opera about capitalistic excess—and demanded their money back at the show’s intermission.

Blitzstein’s lyrics drew heavily from Hellman’s dialogue from the original play—a convention often ignored in opera, whose creators adapt material to their own ends.

In what’s frequently considered the loveliest song in the show, “Birdie’s Aria,” Blitzstein affectingly depicts Regina’s sensitive sister, who mourns the gracious aristocratic manners that once held sway at the family estate, Lionnet, even as she drowns her sorrow in elderberry wine. Birdie becomes a sister under the skin to another lost Southern belle crushed by a rapacious age, Blanche DuBois of A Streetcar Named Desire (which itself was turned into a 1995 opera by Andre Previn).