Most people over 50 have some recollection of the NBC Symphony Orchestra. The first golden era of classical music broadcast must be thought to have begun on the radio waves in 1937 with the inauguration of the NBC Symphony Orchestra which David Sarnoff, President of the Radio Corporation of America, founded for Arturo Toscanini. Audiences enjoyed these weekly broadcasts from 1937 until 1954, continuing under the baton of Leopold Stokowski with Symphony of the Air until 1963.

But how many of us remember that NBC regularly produced and commissioned opera? Forty-three of them to be exact by the time the series ended in 1964. The NBC Opera Theater came into being in 1949. The first opera commissioned by NBC (on radio) was Gian Carlo Menotti’s The Old Man and the Thief in 1949, followed on TV by Menotti’s Amahl and the Night Visitors (1951), The Saint of Bleeker Street (1955), Maria Golovin (1958), and ending with Labyrinth in 1963. [Complete list of performances HERE].

Even on a 17-inch black and white TV, Labyrinth made such a profound and somewhat traumatic impression on me during my musically formative mid-adolescence, that I had been trying for some years to find a video or a score and parts for revival. To my very pleasant surprise, a YouTube video popped up in 2000. Seeing the fuzzy video in color and reencountering the music and images, made for a very poignant déjà vu.

Thereafter I began making inquiries for the score and parts, discovering a couple of years ago that Schirmer would rent them. An inveterate producer of concerts and theatricals, I set about to sell Labyrinth to a local opera company for what would be only the second live, staged professional production since the show debuted on TV (NBC’s planned reprise in November of 1964 was cancelled due to the assassination of John F. Kennedy). The scrappy Cambridge Chamber Ensemble took up my challenge to mount the scary and surreal, but also comic and lyrical show. See some examples of their acclaimed work HERE.

In Labyrinth, which Menotti describes as a “riddle,” a young Groom and his Bride on their honeymoon find themselves in a mysterious ancient hotel, long past its former glory. Hotel guests, some quite dotty, keep popping up, giving increasingly strange advice and bad directions as the couple turn down one hallway after another in an ever more frantic search for their room key. Frantically they sing, “Bell boy, bell boy, wait for me, wait for me…can you find it, can you find the key that unlocks the door …” and then sadly, the bride laments, “I shall never see my home again.” If you stay to the end of the 50-minute show, you’ll see the solution to the riddle.

CCE’s director Martha Birnbaum accepted my challenge to transfigure the passing-strange example of 1960s TV technology into a visually and auditorily mesmerizing production. ”We’ve got some theatrical surprises to guide you through the young couple’s ever more frantic quest for their destiny with all the special effects at our disposal in a live theater space!”

Menotti’s Labyrinth runs at the Cambridge Multicultural Arts Center on November 1, 2, and 3, Tickets HERE. See related review HERE.

Cast

The Groom, Junhan Choi
The Bride, Emma Robertson
Old Man Playing Chess, Patrick Bessenbacher
Astronaut, Fred VanNess Jr.
Spy, AddieRose Brown
Executive Manager, Courtney Elvira
Death, Andrew Boisvert
Death’s Lackey, Jacob O’Shea

Non-singing roles
Executive Manager’s Assistant, Sara Mitnik
Bellboy, Thai Johnson

Artistic Team
Stephanie Beatrice, Conductor & Music Director
Michael Meraw, Stage Director
Martha Birnbaum, Producer
RJ LaMura, Lighting Designer
Brittanie Gigler, Costume Designer
T-Stop Productions, Videography