Lalla Rookh: The Musical!
By Stefene Russell
Photograph by Ralph D’Oench and courtesy of the Missouri Historical Society’s Photographs and Prints Collection
Imagine this is not a 35mm photo of the Veiled Prophet’s Court, but a film still. It’s the twilight of the Hollywood musical, yet MGM has hired Richard Rogers to score Thomas Moore’s poem, Lalla Rookh, The Veiled Prophet of Khorassan. Debbie Reynolds stars as the Queen of Love and Beauty, complete with a dance number with the guys in the reindeer and bird suits. (The characters never figure it out, but it’s revealed to the audience that Yul Brynner is the man behind that gold-flecked polyester lace veil.) Here, as the woman in the silver mini-dress descends the steps, the incidental music swells; in the next cut, a chorus of smiling debutantes in satin pastel ball gowns, posed on a giant wedding cake, bear witness to the “dazzling brow” of the Prophet, singing: “Like the stain’d web that whitens in the sun ... we grow pure by being purely shone upon.”
