What I watched: The third installment of the live theatre series Studio One, which was a performance of Gian Carlo Menotti’s 1946 “modern opera” The Medium. Menotti, who was Italian-born but identified as American, was a well-known composer of hour-long short operas, often presented as double bills. The Medium was one of his biggest successes at this point in his career, although Pulitzer Prizes lay in his future.
The Studio One version aired live on CBS on December 12, 1948 — 7:30 PM on a Sunday. Marie Powers reprised her role as the titular medium, Madame Flora. An American opera vet, this was the biggest role of Powers’ career, and one she played in every contemporary version of The Medium. Leo Coleman and Beverly Dame also reprise their supporting roles from the theatrical version, joined by Lois Hunt (co-starring as Monica), Joseph Bell and Catherine Mastice. The television version was directed by Paul Nickell, who seems to have been doing his first work outside of radio. The episode can be viewed on the Internet Archive.
The episode’s credits are placed on a deck of playing cards
What happened: The opera starts off with young, innocent Monica (Hunt) singing about how much she wishes to be a princess. This is comforting to her brother Toby (Coleman), who is mute, which would seemingly make him a pretty poor opera lead. The siblings are torn from their moment of happiness when their Bad Mom, Madame Flora (Powers), comes home demanding food and drink and verbally abusing her kids. She seems unpleasant.
It turns out that Flora is a psychic and, of course, a phony one. She uses her daughter’s haunting singing voice and dresses her up in a robe to act as the spirit of deceased love ones. She goes through her usual routine, with two regular customers (a couple who want to contact their dead son) and a newcomer inquiring after her daughter. Flora goes through the fake séance full of tricks and mechanism, exploiting the desperation of her customers. However, at the end she feels something touching her and promptly freaks out. She accuses her customers of this, which puzzles them, as they have frequently felt touches from their ghosts. After they leave, Flora turns on her children, accusing them of playing a prank on her.
By the time Act 2 has begun [1], Flora is totally distraught and guilt-ridden, feeling that the touch was a some sort of warning for her fakery. As a Bad Mom, she comes home drunk and looking for affection. Her regular clients show up, but guilt-ridden, she tells them that she’s a fake and they angrily abandon her. A furious Flora throws Leo out of the house, and Monica locks herself in her room to avoid her mother. After exhausting herself with anger, Flora falls asleep. Leo crawls back inside, behind the sheet where Monica hid as part of Madame Flora’s illusion. Flora awakes, thinks her son is an intruder, and shoots him, presumably because not enough bad things have happened to her thus far. End of play!
Honestly, who wouldn’t shoot this guy?
What I thought: It won’t be spoiling anything to say that televised opera did not exactly take off. And, while I know that English-language opera is a thing, it still seems distinctly odd here, with utterly mundane English dialogue (“We’ve come here every week for two years”) stretched out to fit Italian vocal rhythms. It also makes the dialogue hard to understand, a problem which I imagine was only compounded by the poor audio quality of early television.
Still, “The Medium” [2] was an understandable choice for CBS’s new anthology drama series, which was based on the radio series of the same name. The decision to program live theatre on the still-young medium of television was ambitious [3], and the new show required material that had the air of prestige but was still accessible. Menotti’s opera, English-language with modern settings and a relatively short length, was a perfect fit. Like Toscanini, it was highbrow culture for middlebrows, which is to say it was highbrow television.
Studio One’s production of The Medium was a little funky, with a strange set including da Vinci’s anatomical man on the wall and a lamp which goes up and down as part of the fake medium’s act. The camerawork was basic but effective, with close-ups reserved for arias and a wide-angle shot used for most of the action. There’s not nearly enough flair to paper over the plot, which is a rather dry moral lesson heaped with Dickensian misery. The opera format also does more to confuse than enchant.
Still, “The Medium” does touch on the horror of death and the horror of grief in some interesting ways. Madame Flora’s marks are so desperate to hear from their loved ones again that they initially refuse to accept her admission that she is a fraud, so sure that the voices and touches they imagined were real. The scam ultimately works because they want to believe, because the concept of a child being lost forever is so ungraspable. And of course, in the contrived ending, it is this loss which Madame Flora suffers herself.
The acting, from a group of theatrical veterans, helps to convey the depths of suffering more than the libretto. One of the few genuinely affecting moments of singing is when Bell plaintively repeats “Please send my son to me” — in this moment his grief is not a plot device but frighteningly real.
Powers in general is a real gem, wearing her character’s mixture of guilt and rage on her face as well as through her body language. Television wouldn’t always be kind to older women, but it would offer them deep and extended roles that they couldn’t find anywhere else. “The Medium” is here, if nowhere else, a sign of things to come.
What else is on?: NBC aired a series called Welcome Aboard, Variety (presumably a variety show), while DuMont showed Amateur Hour and ABC something called Pauline Frederick’s Guest Book.
Coming up next: Are you ready for some football?
[1] The Medium was a one-act opera, but Studio One splits it into two acts, seemingly just to fit in station identification and make it seem more theatrical.
[2] As a MLA nerd, I’ll be referring to the episode in quotation marks and the play it’s adapted from in italics, although there’s not that important a distinction.
[3] NBC’s Kraft Television Theatre, a similar program, had been airing for a year, but its archive is much less widely-available than that of Studio One.
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