Gian Carlo Menotti, The Medium (1945) and The Telephone (1947)

Two short operas.  The latter debuted on a double bill with the former, so let's watch them together, shall we?

The Medium concerns a woman, Madame Flora, who, with her daughter Monica and mute servant Toby, makes an unsavory living tricking bereaved parents into thinking they're communicating with their dead children.  She's very cynical about this, but then, as a seance is ending, she thinks she feels some sort of phantom hand grabbing her and freaks out.  Was this Toby's doing?  Or was it something actually supernatural?  She decides she's not going to run her scam anymore, but the people refuse to believe she was faking it.  In the end, becoming ever-more unglued, she accidentally shoots Toby.  That is that.

There are some really good musical moments highlights here, notably Monica's waltz and "The Black Swan," the lullaby that she sings to her mother.  Furthermore, it is, at any rate, a fairly novel plot: I'm sure it's been done elsewhere, but "charlatan has existential crisis" is an interesting idea.  I have to admit, though, I didn't find it all that dramatically compelling.  I watched this old CBS production, of the same vintage as that Saint of Bleecker Street but of significantly better quality, though the lack of subtitles remains an issue.

The Telephone is a comedy.  Ben is going on a trip; before he leaves, he wants to tell Lucy that he loves her and to propose, but goshdarnit, she keeps getting phone calls and he can't tell her and time is getting short before he has to leave and this dang ol' telephone is going to doom his efforts!  It seems, for a while, that it might be a sort of dyspeptic thing about how technology ruins everything, but in the end he hits on the expedient of calling her himself, and that works out.  So it turns out to be good-natured, which improved my impression of it a lot.

Of course, if Menotti thinks regular ol' telephones are bad, how would he react to smartphones?  Well... this production very effectively updates the action to the present day.  There are popup text messages on the screen and everything.  Granted, you do have to suspend your disbelief and disregard the fact that young people today simply don't make phone calls period, but otherwise, it works remarkably well.  Extremely cleverly done--and filmed (safely, they claim) during COVID, too, so that's kind of heartening.