When I was a very small child, my nanna used to take me to the "pictures" at the Metro cinema in Manly, NSW. The Metro only showed MGM films, and at Christmas the main feature was preceded by what today we would call a clip. It featured a man singing "Ave Maria" in church, with a boys choir. At the end––and it felt interminable––a message came up: "Metro Goldwyn Mayer wishes you the compliments of the season." Christmas was not mentioned specifically, since Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer was run by the Jewish entrepreneur Louis B. Mayer.
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The clip was from a movie called The Great Caruso. It starred one of MGM's true superstars of the 1950s, an American tenor named Mario Lanza. Mario had an extremely successful film career, but it was also remarkably short. He became hard to handle. As soon as Mayer retired, MGM sacked Mr Lanza. At the time, he was halfway through making The Student Prince. He had already recorded the songs, so the obscure Edmund Purdom was brought in to lip-synch to his voice. Although Lanza's services were terminated, he was still under contract to MGM. The terms of the contract prevented him from accepting any other work, anywhere, for three years. By then he was broke. Like MGM's other "difficult" superstar Marilyn Monroe, Lanza died young, under mysterious circumstances. He was 38.
In two cities thousands of miles from Manly, two other little boys watched the Lanza Christmas clip, and decided on a career in singing. Their names? Luciano Pavarotti and Placido Domingo. (To be fair, Domingo's father was already a professional tenor, but Mario's influence clinched it.) As a small child himself, Mario and his family in New York had been visited by the famous tenor Enrico Caruso, who anointed the child as his successor. That may be apocryphal: it sounds like the work of the MGM publicity department to me. Anyway, it's a story Mario retold frequently. He was a notorious liar. Also a binge eater, a voracious womaniser, generous, temperamental... well, he was Italian.
I had not thought about Mario Lanza for decades when Blake Bowden came to me with the idea of doing a theatrical cabaret on the subject. I'd known Blake as an up-and-coming music theatre star for a few years, and had just heard him sing beautifully as Lieutenant Cable in Opera Australia's production of South Pacific. I jumped at the chance to work with such a talent.
We decided early on that Lanza's life should be dramatised. With this kind of show, the thing to avoid is turning it into a lecture. To that end, while Blake plays Mario, I take on 10 different characters, ranging from a (fictitious) New York singing teacher, to a US Army sergeant, through to Louis B. Mayer himself. (As well as a piano accompanist, of course.) Luckily I have some background training, having impersonated several former Prime Ministers over the years in The Wharf Revue.
The trickiest character I essay in this show is Mario's Hollywood fitness trainer... for obvious reasons. Namely, I am unfit for the role. To make up for the lack of female characters in the piece, we also decided to include a promising young operatic soprano. Relax, it's not me. Fortunately, we find one sitting in the audience every night.
Near the end of the show, I play a shady Mafia figure. Lanza eventually moved to Italy, where he was booked to do a live concert in Palermo. Mafia money was rumoured to be involved. At the last minute, the capricious ex-superstar pulled out, and the boys were not happy. Very shortly afterwards, Mario was hospitalised in Rome with a mysterious heart ailment. He died unexpectedly––though at least one person may have expected it. There was no autopsy. The body was cremated even before his wife arrived from New York. Foul play has been hinted at ever since, especially in the most lurid of the biographies.
We had two problems with this. One: it's a downer when your main character dies at the end of a show. In the TV series Smash, concerning the making of a Broadway musical about Monroe, that's the big hurdle they face. She dies. What else can you do? It happened!
Our second problem was that the Mafia story has been thoroughly ridiculed by an international Mario Lanza Appreciation Society, which is still active. In fact, the man who heads the organisation lives in Melbourne. We have performed Mario in Sydney, Adelaide and now Canberra... but not Melbourne. Even so, if he got wind of it, things could get ugly. Blake, our director Chris Parker and I found a way to solve both these problems at once... but you'll have to see the show to find out how we do it.
Mario: The story and music of Mario Lanza is at the Courtyard Studio May 19 - 21. Visit canberratheatrecentre.com.au for more information.
