It’s just not true that Gian Carlo Menotti composed The Medium as an opera only because he couldn’t get Joan Crawford to do it when his libretto was originally a screenplay. But you can see how these rumors get started. I know what I’m talking about here, because I started that one myself.  

The story of the opera resembles a Twilight Zone episode. Perhaps it’s too gritty for Zone, but Rod Serling’s show was a dozen years in the future when The Medium premiered. Madame Flora is a phony psychic who soaks the bereaved by faking otherworldly communication. But then things… start happening. She feels things; she hears them, too. Cynic she may be, but Flora loses her cool. She rampages. She drinks. There’s a loaded gun in the house. This cannot end well. I see Crawford all over it. Natalie Wood and Sal Mineo for the kids, Monica and Toby. Could we get Nicholas Ray to direct?

It seems likely that Jeffery Roberson, more widely known as Varla Jean Merman, saw Crawford all over it, too. After years as the (oft-) crowned queen of Provincetown and points west, not to mention a stint as Little Mary Sunshine in Chicago on Broadway, he brings diva hauteur and a small but respectable (unmiked) alto to the tawdry role of ill-tempered, belt-wielding Madame Flora for a run at the Little Theater in the West Side Y on 64th Street.

There are falsetto voices that can bring off roles composed for post-castrato operatic mezzos, but Roberson/Merman lacks the operatic weight to shatter or threaten by mere throb. What he has got is true pitch and (despite a lisp that suits the realism of the story) excellent diction. Flora talks a lot, in many moods, in an angry temper to the children, in a haughty simper to the punters, in a gravelly, sulky, self-pitying snarl in a long, drunken monologue. Roberson’s Flora held me, and even appeared to be a woman in the role. Only when it was over did I regret the power real mezzos can bring to Flora’s passionate ungluing.

Stefanie Izzo sang a very strong Monica, a Mimi in bud, though in a small theater she’s too old for this part. If Monica were old enough to leave her disreputable mother and get a job she’d surely do so; she can’t be more than sixteen and should be played about sixteen. Edmund Bagnell made a very pretty Toby and he plays the violin prettily too at moments when, in most productions, the mute boy picks up a tambourine. He, too, though, is mature for the part and the subtle feeling between him and Monica was overt here.

But the real flaw in the staging came in the scene where Flora accuses him, beats him and throws him out – she sings, over and over, of how his staring eyes unnerve her, but instead of crouching in the corner, immobile and cat-like, instead of leaving the action to his persecutor’s imagination as the text insists, Toby was directed to dart about or lean against her thigh, wincing at her hand in his hair. The director, Donna Drake, did not have faith in Menotti’s text and careful descriptions, and Menotti knew exactly what he was doing.

The small roles of Flora’s duped clients were sung and played to a high standard by Shannon Carson, Maria Elena Armijo and Peter Kendall Clark.

The Medium was originally staged on Broadway, where it had, for an opera, a respectable run and an enduring notoriety. Six characters, small orchestra, no chorus, one set, ninety minutes running time (originally there was a cute curtain-raiser, The Telephone, which is probably unplayable today, in the era of call waiting). The Medium was beloved for years by small companies and music schools, Madame Flora having clear appeal to dramatic mezzos with theatrical chops but not exactly Amneris weight, while Monica is a great part for a lyric soprano.

Menotti’s vocal lines are as grateful as they are listenable; no young voice was ever damanged by singing them. The opera inspired a splendid send-up in New Faces of 1952, in which Toby, a composer depressed by the reviews foreseen by his fortunetelling mother, threw himself into a washing machine. The telephone rings: “Toby? Oh he’s around. And around … and around …”

For a postwar world grown cynical about traditional faith, Menotti asked just the right question: Is there anything out there? A professed skeptic, he wisely offered no clear answer, but he found a way to turn it into a tragic anecdote. (The makers of The X-Files got a series out of it, and Whoopi Goldberg had Ghost.) Menotti’s precise, effective score includes the “Black Swan” duet, a lovely nostalgic folkish tune, and Monica’s Waltz, a popular audition aria. I’m delighted to see The Medium again, in the right-size theater, and to see it make its effects without excess camp.

Photo: Michael von Redlich.