Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Some of the steam was taken out of Billy Rose's pipe dreams last week. The Metropolitan Opera announced that it would be able to have a 1948-49 season after all, and without Billy's help. The season would start late-possibly not until the first of December-and be only 16 or 17 weeks long...
...Chairs. Nobody could quarrel with Billy's replacements, if they could be had. "To the left of the chairman sits Arturo Toscanini . . . [then] Bernard M. Baruch ... as financial adviser . . . Around the big mahogany table are opera experts like [the Berkshire Festival's] Boris Goldovsky and [Manhattan's City Opera boss] Laszlo Halasz, theater men like Oscar Hammerstein II and Robert Edmond Jones." Others: Stage Directors Elia Kazan, Jose Ferrer, Rouben Mamoulian; Choreographers Agnes de Mille, Antony Tudor, Jerome Robbins. "Who would sit in the 37th [he meant the 38th] chair...
...gone in the hole only twice in its history-once 30 years ago, when a flash flood washed away half the scenery and instruments on opening night, and once during the depression. Both times the backers were paid back within two years. One big reason is that their summer opera has become a family habit for St. Louisans-from grandma to the kids. Another reason-and perhaps a bigger one-is the quality of its performances. Even a foreign critic from Dallas recently admitted that St. Louis' Municipal Opera is to summer operetta companies "what the Metropolitan...
...Muny has tried to put on grand opera only four times, and with little success. Instead, it offers a first-rate production of light opera and musical comedy-with first-rate casts. Some summer-opera alumni: Irene Dunne, Gary Grant (he was then Archie Leach), Allan Jones...
...made news-his winning of the U.S. fencing championship in 1890; the time his 1,520-ton steam yacht was wrecked in the Madeira Islands (he won a medal for saving his guests); his fabulous parties ("sumptuous pleasure campaigns," the papers called them); his romance with Emma Calve, the opera star. "Mr. Higgins," wrote one society editor in 1898, "is not only the richest, but the handsomest unmarried New Yorker. He is a devoted golfer, an expert cross-country rider, a 'good gun,' a skillful fisherman, and a yachtsman of no mean seamanship. Sartorially, he is all that...