Williams Mixes Play And Opera At New Orleans
by Stanley Meisler
Commentary by Stanley Meisler
January 18, 1955
January 1955
New Orleans, Louisiana
original articleThe Commercial Appeal (Memphis, Tennessee)
original articleNo items found.
A play and an opera mixed in a world premiere Monday night to produce an odd but exciting evening with Tennessee Williams. With the help of New Orleans talent, a Broadway cast presented Williams' "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" and an opera by Raffaello de Banfield was based on another short play by Williams, "Lord Byron's Love Letters." In their different ways, the play and opera have similar stories to tell. Both are concerned with people who hold to the past. In "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," a small cotton gin owner in the Delta area of Northeast Mississippi tried to keep his place by burning down the Syndicate Plantation's big gin. The action of "Lord Byron's Love Letters," is the New Orleans French Quarter of the late 19th Century. An old woman lived in the memory of her love affair with Lord Byron, when she was 16. Moods of the works, however, are not the same. The play is coarse and comic, while the opera has poetic sweetness...
A play and an opera mixed in a world premiere Monday night to produce an odd but exciting evening with Tennessee Williams. With the help of New Orleans talent, a Broadway cast presented Williams' "27 Wagons Full of Cotton" and an opera by Raffaello de Banfield was based on another short play by Williams, "Lord Byron's Love Letters." In their different ways, the play and opera have similar stories to tell. Both are concerned with people who hold to the past. In "27 Wagons Full of Cotton," a small cotton gin owner in the Delta area of Northeast Mississippi tried to keep his place by burning down the Syndicate Plantation's big gin. The action of "Lord Byron's Love Letters," is the New Orleans French Quarter of the late 19th Century. An old woman lived in the memory of her love affair with Lord Byron, when she was 16. Moods of the works, however, are not the same. The play is coarse and comic, while the opera has poetic sweetness...
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