Word: pagliacci
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Italian-born, Salmaggi began in the U.S. as a singing teacher with the claim of having taught Italy's Queen Margherita how to play the mandolin. In 1915 he took his first plunge: a production of Pagliacci at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in which he sang the part of Canio himself. As a tenor, he was a spectacular bust. But he took in $7,000 at the box office...
...last line of I Pagliacci, sung by a clown who has just stabbed a man and a woman...
...keyboard. It took Louise Crane seven months to track him down in Manhattan. The five vocalists chose an appalling name for their collective debut: the Sophistichords. But they deftly turned English and European songs inside out, kidded the pants off the clown's teary air from Pagliacci. The band of the evening, John Kirby's, had not been hard to find. Plain people know it-in Manhattan's Café Society and on CBS's Duffy's Tavern-as one of the best of the small ones...
...time there. Back in Chicago, he labored over his puppets, in 1938 gave a public show which was a critical success but a financial flop. In 1939 he was signed up by Gas Exhibits, Inc. at the New York World's Fair, performed his repertory-Carmen, Faust, Rigoletto, Pagliacci, Aïda, Traviata, Cavalleria Rusticana-to audiences which were 85% grownup. Since the autumn of 1939 the troupe has toured 100,000 miles...
Puppeteer Wolff now has over 200 13-inch troupers, with wooden heads made from stock male & female models: only a wig and a beard differentiate Mephistopheles from the clown in Pagliacci. The puppets are worked not by strings from above but by rods from below stage. There a crew of five (headed by Mr. Wolff's plump, Czech-born mother), seated on rolling stools, scuttle about like water bugs. In the triumphal scene in Aïda they have 75 puppets to handle. Mrs. Wolff designed the costumes, sometimes copying the Met's. Settings, too, are modeled after...