Word: opera
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Seven nights a week the huge lights in St. Louis' Forest Park flash on, flooding the park with a blinding glare-the signal to the audience that the show is over. One night next week when the lights blaze, about 12,000 Municipal Opera fans will rise to 'their feet and roar out Auld Lang Syne with the cast, as they have regularly at the close of St. Louis' summer operetta seasons since...
...they make their way out of their leafy open-air theater, St. Louisans can be comfortably proud of their Municipal Opera, which is neither municipally owned nor opera. Philadelphia's summer concerts in Robin Hood Dell had folded in midseason, and Manhattan's popular Lewisohn Stadium concerts had limped through to an $84,000 deficit. But the St. Louis company has taken in the most money ($650,000) of any season in its history, and played to its biggest one-night audience (11,935 f°r a performance of Rio Rita) during its 12½-week season...
...some streamlining, he would personally foot any losses for the year (obviously he didn't think there would be any). Billy would "introduce modern lighting, staging, choreography and certain other elements of present-day stagecraft . . . without tampering with what is fine and traditionally right about grand opera." He also thought he could "fire and enthuse the staff into doing a more exciting job"-and the Met could certainly use a little of that. Chairman Sloan's reply was respectful as could be: he wanted to have another lunch with Billy "so that we may have the further benefit...
...week's end, it seemed certain that the Met would open this fall, though a little late. But if the crisis was about over, a few questions were still unanswered. What kind of opera was it going to be? Did the board realize that opera fans had given it no vote of confidence for the handling of its affairs? What was the board going to do to improve the quality of Met productions...
Died. May de Sousa, 66, light-opera favorite at the turn of the century; of starvation; in a Chicago charity ward. A detective's daughter, she first sang in vaudeville, moved on to Broadway, hit her peak touring Europe in such productions as The Wizard of Oz and The Tenderfoot. She retired in 1918, moved to Shanghai, returned to the U.S. penniless in 1943, and set to work as a scrubwoman...