Word: opera
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Chicago Civic Opera performance of Mignon, Tito Schipa, supposed to carry Gladys Swarthout off stage, let Désiré Defrère substitute in the job. Proxy Defrère stumbled, dropped her. Explained Slacker Schipa: "She is, you understand, a little heavy, I do not say she is fat, just a little heavy." Retorted Proxy Defrère, "I slipped on a tack. It was only natural I do the job. Schipa is too puny...
While the audience in Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera House waited & waited for the curtain to rise, they whiled away the time by reading in their programs an apologia-by Surrealist Salvador Dali himself-for the surrealist ballet they were about...
...before a punctured mountain on a windswept plain, an ossified swan spread 15-ft. wings. In and out of its ruptured, bony breast the Ballet Russe de Monte Carlo's ballerinas climbed like the maggoty stuffing of a decayed Thanksgiving turkey. In the orchestra pit the staid Metropolitan Opera orchestra surged and noodled conventionally through Wagner's foaming music. But the cavorting it accompanied would have turned a Wagnerian's hair white in a single act. No Tannhäuser was its central protagonist, but mad King Ludwig of Bavaria (Wagner's patron), who reared...
Social rigmarole bores him stiff: he detests dinner-parties, loathes travel, has never been to the opera, took his first drink at 30 and has taken few since. He fights innovation, was almost the last person to adopt soft collars and a wrist watch, was once told by his wife "It's a good thing you were not the world's first baby, or you'd still be crawling...
Blithely letting it teeter, Shaw shifts his base and conducts a League-of-Nations trial of Hitler, Mussolini and Franco, with a British diplomat and a Soviet Commissar to whoop things up. In fantastic costumes and with grand-opera flourishes, truculent "Battler" (Maurice Colbourne), swaggering "Bombardone" and arrogant "Flanco" engage in a vicious dialectical dogfight, snapping at the judge and at one another like so many paradoxhunds...