Word: pitting
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Diagonal Demons. From the pit, Igor Stravinsky's 40-year-old score blazed as never before: Stravinsky himself had cut down the instrumentation from the original no pieces to 55, given the score new warmth, color and compactness. Choreographer George Balanchine had scrapped Fokine's original Russian-folk-dancy choreography completely, put his more Oriental Bird and Prince on more acrobatic tiptoe...
Great credit is due to Sam V. K. Willson who leaned back in his seat throughout, directing both the onstage and pit choruses. The stage being very small, he found it necessary to keep a majority of the dragoons and rapturous maidens seated in the pit. The idea was a great success. It not only left the stage uncluttered, but it provided the necessary volume for the chorus parts...
...dragoon guards, resplendent in red and yellow costumes, never let themselves show the strain of an opening night, nor the boredom of singing something that they had done hundreds of times before in rehearsal. Their antics onstage frequently left the pit dragoons laughing so much they were incapable of singing...
...Into the Pit. Some of the enthusiasm reached the pit. From the instant Conductor Reiner slashed the air with the downbeat, the Met's musicians plunged into the lush ripeness of Strauss's score like field mice set at fragrant cheddar. But little of the enthusiasm got through to the cast onstage...
...hundred oil scouts, brokers, geologists and gawking neighbors around the tin-hatted crew working the rig on a 128-ft. oil derrick. As Joe and they watched, there was a cough and a sputter; then a stream of oil shot out 30 ft. and poured into the mud sump pit. Joe York rubbed his hands in the oil, smelled it and smiled. "I guess I won't have to go back to milking those Jersey cows," he said. The oil scouts took but one look and one sniff, jumped in their cars and raced for telephones...