Adams House Will Resume Opera; Lowell Plans Spectacle Production

Adams House will again compete with the Lowell Opera next spring. After a year's lapse Adams House will return to opera with a performance of "The Mother of Us All," by Virgil Thompson and Gertrude Stein. The tentative date is for March 2, 3, and 4.

Lowell House will retaliate in the last week of April with a production of Smetana's "The Bartered Bride," a nineteenth century Czech gala spectacle. Musical director Howard M. Brown describes the opera as a "Bohemian Gilbert and Sullivan" executed in the old European grand manner. Producer John H. Poppy '57 is planning for a cast of 70, supported by 60 student musicians.

Accommodating 130 actors and musicians and an audience in the Lowell House dining hall may be a problem, Poppy said. The technical difficulties are not all solved, but the Opera Committee plans to ramp one end of the dining hall to raise the back seats.

The Adams House presentation will be a New England premiere of "The Mother of Us All," first put on in 1947. Victor Yellin, Adams House music tutor and director of this production, describes the opera as a serious intellectual creation which uses the post-Civil War struggles of Susan B. Anthony, a leading suffragette, to exemplify the spirit that has led to the attainment of American goals and freedoms.

Musically, the opera is a pioneer work since it covers a neglected field--the midwestern musical tradition. The simple, strongly harmonic folk songs in Thompson's score are traceable to English folk music in Anglo-Saxon times.