Word: covention
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Gilt & Elbow Grease. However, few Britons will concede that Britain has lost anything of her basic vitality or human potential. The show will go on, as colorfully as possible. Last week Covent Garden, London's Royal Opera House, which jitterbugging G.I.s used as a dance hall during the war, reopened with a gala performance of the Tchaikovsky ballet Sleeping Beauty. The King and Queen, Queen Mary and the Princesses arrived in their gleaming Daimlers. A photographer, kneeling in the crush, tugged at a trousered leg, begged: "Give us a break, will you, George." He was embarrassed when the King...
...Bevin, most of the Cabinet appeared in evening dress. But leftist Health Minister Aneurin Bevan inevitably went in a sack suit, his leftist-M.P. wife Jennie Lee in her usual red tweed coat and lizard-skin shoes. Outside the royal box there were only two tiaras. And Covent Garden's scarlet-&-gold opulence had been restored mostly by mere elbow grease. Explained the manager: "Very little new paint has been used, and then only in cases where it was necessary for cleanliness. . . . There is hardly a spot of new gilt anywhere in the theater...
...front row at London's Covent Garden sat a chubby Irish lad who thought he knew something about singing, too. He had a gold medal from a Dublin musical festival to prove it. And he had been making $50 a week, singing at the St. Louis Exposition. That night in 1905 he first heard the great Enrico Caruso in La Boheme. "The best lesson . . . I ever received," John McCormack said, years later. The lesson: that a singer with a natural gift, and powerful lungs, still had to work...
...year-old John McCormack went off to Milan to study. Two years later he was on the Covent Garden stage himself, singing Cavalleria Rusticana. And in another two years he was a hit at Oscar Hammerstein's Manhattan Opera House. Critics still had reservations: they referred to him as "the best endowed lyric tenor of his time." Ah, but singing Kathleen Mavourneen or Irish Eyes when Al Smith or Jimmy Walker or any other good Irishman was about, he'd steal their hearts away...
...myself." Said the critic of Novedades: "The performance could only be described as weird. Unfortunately, those who did not attend may have been misled by one of my distinguished colleagues who rushed into print Sunday morning stating that the performance could hardly be equaled at Covent Garden or any European capital. Unfortunately his paper goes to bed at midnight, whereas the performance dragged on desperately until 2:15. His crystal ball must have been out of order...