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Help, Help, the Globolinks! (review)

2008; Music Library Association; Volume: 65; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/not.0.0056

1534-150X

Kendra Preston Leonard,

Digital Games and Media

Reviewed by: Help, Help, the Globolinks! Kendra Preston Leonard Gian Carlo Menotti. Help, Help, the Globolinks! DVD. Matthias Kuntzsch / Hamburg Philharmonic State Orchestra, Ballet of the Hamburg State Opera and Children’s Choir of the NDR. With Edith Mathis, Arlene Saunders, Raymond Wolansky, William Workman, Kurt Marschner, Ursula Boese, Franz Grundheber, Noël Mangin. Leipzig: Arthaus Musik, 2007. 101 281. $29.99. Gian Carlo Menotti composed Help, Help, the Globolinks! in 1968 as a pro-music opera for “children and those still young at heart.” Unlike his earlier and more successful works, including The Consul (1950) and The Saint of Bleeker Street (1955), The Globolinks contains little of Menotti’s usual originality or charm. The music is in the style of Puccini, accessible and light but not particularly interesting. The plot too is simple: [End Page 146] aliens invade Earth, music drives them away. The audience is pounded with the message that music is important and good. Although Menotti had written well for children previously—his television opera Amahl and the Night Visitors has become a holiday staple—this work is condescending to the audience and without much merit, save for students of Menotti’s works or designers interested in the aesthetic of the German avant-garde of the 1960s. This DVD contains a version of the opera filmed in 1969 and based on the premiere’s staging and design. The audio quality is very good, but the video has been reclaimed from old footage and is grainy. While the singing is generally very good, the production itself can only be described as “trippy.” In the first scene, schoolchildren dressed much like the Von Trapp clan find themselves lost in the woods, and soon strange creatures appear, accompanied by an abstract light show set among “steel towers fitted with tilting and rotating mirrors.” (DVD booklet, 14) These creatures are the Globolinks. Female Globolinks are portrayed by acrobats in vivid leotards with ten-foot quills rising from their backs, much like porcupines. The male aliens are dancers in segmented tubes of fabric; they scuttle and hop across the sets. The children—led by William Workman in excellent voice as the children’s bus driver—soon discover that music banishes the Globolinks. Emily, sung very well by Edith Mathis, is the only one of the children who has a musical instrument with her—a violin. She begins to play and fends off the aliens as she searches for help for the rest of the group. In the second scene, music teacher Madame Euterpova, sung well but badly overacted by Arlene Saunders, complains to the school principal that none of the children have taken their instruments with them to practice on their holiday. Madame Euterpova, dressed in swirls of pink and accessorized by a tuning fork and an enormous and pointless false nose, regales the principal with her woes, swooping about his office. Once she leaves, the Globolinks attack the principal. He is tone deaf and cannot sing or play to them, and begins to morph into a Globolink himself. His staff discovers that he can no longer speak, but can only make the beeps and blurps of the Globolinks, sounding much like a forerunner to R2-D2. In the third scene, he is sent into the forest to rescue the children, the rationale being that he can communicate to some degree with both aliens and humans. In the final scene, Emily’s violin is destroyed by the Globolinks, the principal still cannot sing, and all seems lost. Just as the Globolinks flood the set and their light show begins, Madame Euterpova and a marching band made up of the school’s staff arrive to save the day. The principal, now fully alien, is taken by the Globolinks as they depart in defeat. The DVD contains a booklet with a plot summary, chapter titles, a brief biography of Menotti, and a note on the production and design of the opera. Kendra Preston Leonard Drexel Hill, PA Copyright © 2008 Music Library Association, Inc