DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT

Today I saw the DVD of the Donizetti opera DAUGHTER OF THE REGIMENT.  That's the one where Marie, a foundling adopted by a whole French army regiment, gets her live saved by a foreign peasant called Tonio and they fall in love, but she turns out to be the long-lost niece of a Marquise (actually her daughter, it later turns out), who takes her off to her castle to turn her into a lady of quality...

This version, translated into English, is a 1974 production, staged outdoors in a Virginia state park part of a summer festival and videotaped by the PBS station in Washington, DC.  The costumes were from Malabar in Toronto, which also provides the TOR costumes! (The closing credits misspelled it as "Malabor," and omitted the "c" from the publisher Schirmer's name.)

Most importantly, Marie was played by Beverley Sills in her first televised opera performance. (Sills describes Marie as "Lucille Ball with high notes.") When she came out the audience broke into wild applause like when Henry Winkler's Fonzie made his entrance on HAPPY DAYS.

Also, I saw a DVD of some early episodes of THAT GIRL, the sitcom with Marlo Thomas as an aspiring actress in New York City. (At the start of the episode some character, asked whom he'd chosen, would point at MT and say "That girl!" then the show's title would appear below her gaping face.) It's pretty dated, the kind of show where she gets scared by a mouse and when she first arrives in NYC her agent finds her a part right away.  It's only a tiny role on a kiddie show where she plays a mop that gets pushed around a floor, but still!