Word: coventionalism
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London's historic Covent Garden opera house, reopened last year, has been doing a big business with the famed Sadler's Wells ballet. The Garden managers, counting their profits, decided to take a flyer on a permanent opera company. To play it as safe as they could, they imported promising young Sopranos Audrey Bowman and Virginia MacWatters from the U.S. and hired as director an Austrian refugee named Karl Rankl, who had conducted opera in Vienna, Berlin and Prague...
...Covent Garden Opera Co. opened its first opera season shortly before Christmas-not with an opera but with a 255-year-old musical revue, The Fairy Queen. In 1692 Composer Henry Purcell and an anonymous playwright dashed off a travesty on Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Its original seven hours now whittled down to three, The Fairy Queen was a lavish, confusing show full of dancers, coloratura arias, drunken comics and a Chinese grand finale. To put it on, Covent Garden had to call in its Sadler's Wells Co. and eight professional actors...
...last week The Fairy Queen had established Covent Garden's opera as a business; now it had only to succeed as an opera company. Next week, as its first real opera, Covent Garden scheduled Carmen...
...ballet companies were dancing out a personal feud between two former partners: American Ballerina Lucia Chase and Russian-born Sol Hurok, the Little White Father of ballet in America. Last spring Miss Chase canceled her contract with Hurok and took her troupe to London, where they packed Covent Garden for two months. Thereupon Manager Hurok imported the Russian troupe from South America and bolstered it up with the peerless Alicia Markova (born Alice Marks of London) and other favorites. Then the two companies booked parallel autumn seasons, and the battle...
...tarnished grandeur, Britain still had elbow grease for bigger jobs than Covent Garden. Burly Ernie Bevin was one link between the two. As he left, a dowager spotted him and cried: "There he is! I must touch him." She had to stretch...