1935 Pulitzer play taking an operatic turn

They’ve made operas out of a Gilded Age novel (“McTeague”) and a Robert Altman movie (“A Wedding”). Now, composer William Bolcom and librettist Arnold Weinstein are slated to turn playwright Robert Anderson’s 1935 antiwar comedy “Idiot’s Delight” into a chamber opera for Florentine Opera of Milwaukee.

Soprano Joan Morris, Bolcom’s wife, and pianist-singer Max Morath will take the lead roles originally played by famed husband-and-wife team Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. The premiere is tentatively set for spring 2007 at Milwaukee’s Pabst Theater, where the Lunts appeared in the Pulitzer Prize-winning play.

“The play is funny and it’s tragic, and it will be a terrific vehicle for Joan,” Bolcom says. “Alfred Lunt got so interested in being a cheap vaudevillian, he went to see Milton Berle’s act for a number of years to pick up some pointers.”

Sherwood’s play -- which was made into a 1939 movie starring Clark Gable and Norma Shearer -- involves an eccentric group of characters trapped at an Alpine resort as war breaks out.

“There’s a mood today in many ways reminiscent of the ‘30s,” says Bolcom. “We all sense that a lot of disasters are developing. We’re right in the middle of it, a general atmosphere of foreboding.”