Word: hurok
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Naturally, the reason for it all is the life of an impresario, director and producer, Sol Hurok. A penniless Russian immigrant, he came to America in 1910, and in ten years became the greatest showman of the age. Albeit the story is the well worn, Horatio Alger type, sensitive acting, and the interludes of line music make it a completely new experience. Even the inevitable matrimonial difficulties are touching...
...says Mattiwilda Dobbs. But she is already scheduled to sing the big coloratura role in Strauss's Ariadne auf Naxos at the Glyndebourne Festival next summer. Her records of Mozart's Zaide (Poly-music) and Bizet's Pearl Fishers (Renaissance) are winning top notices. Impresario Sol Hurok, who is bringing her back to the U.S. next season, has his eye fixed on the Metropolitan for Mattiwilda...
Tonight We Sing (20th Century-Fox) is an opulent, star-spangled, two-hour film concert featuring the famed clients, past & present, of famed Impresario S. (for Sol) Hurok. The picture offers such flesh & blood talents as Tamara Toumanova, Isaac Stern, Roberta Peters, and the sound-track voice of Jan Peerce. It also fondly recalls such historic Hurok clients as Anna Pavlova. Eugéne Ysaÿe and Feodor Chaliapin...
...with these highbrow attractions, the picture presents a fairly lowbrow, offstage story loosely based on Hurok's 1946 autobiography, Impresario. Hurok (David Wayne) is depicted as a sort of Russian Horatio Alger who migrated to America, and became in short order the Barnum of the arts by purveying musical culture to the masses. For drama, the picture develops a domestic schism between Hurok and his wife (Anne Bancroft), caused by his excessive devotion to his work...
...with the show by giving a lustily humorous performance and singing snatches from Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Gounod's Faust, and a chorus of The Volga Boatman. These latter-day artists offer an earnest approximation of the originals. David Wayne, using a vaguely Russian accent, plays Hurok as a kind of uncommercially-minded wet nurse to a gang of temperamental darlings. Veteran Hurok himself, now 64 and one of the shrewdest showmen alive, would undoubtedly be the first to admit that he has done as much as anyone to make an industry...