Word: rigaud
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Strauss Goes to Boston (music by Robert Stolz & Johann Strauss Jr.; lyrics by Robert Sour; book by Leonard L. Levinson; produced by Felix Brentano) opened Broadway's 1945-46 season without letting in much fresh air. An operetta about Johann Strauss (George Rigaud) headlining the great Boston Jubilee of 1872 and breaking hearts on Beacon Hill, it muffs the three real opportunities provided by the story. Far from conveying any of the devilish Strauss charm it babbles about, the book doesn't even billow with good lush operetta sentiment; it is just crushingly dull...
Picture, if you can, Johann Strauss as a Don Juan in Sinatra clothing acted by an insignificant George Rigaud, who, though portraying the role of the Vienese Waltz King took no pains in disguising an obvious French accent. Picture Ralph Dumke as a mediocre W. C. Fields, General Grant popping in and out with trite world peace comments, Beacon Hill prudes condemning the immoral waltz, ballet scenes dragged in now and then, all this with gaudy costumes, plaids of all descriptions and colors splashed on the stage...
...song and is destined most likely to fall into the clutches of the radio. The second act, getting off to a boring start and failing to attain the standards set by the first, featured ballet routines well danced by Harold Lang and Babs Heath. In a stirring finale Mr. Rigaud gave a ridiculous performance of Strauss conducting a 1000 piece orchestra, a chorus of 20,000 voices, and 150 clattering firemen, which had been assembled for a Peace Jubilee Concert...
There were other irritations. Slick, sleek Jacques Lemaigre-Dubreuil, big-time oilman, banker and part owner of the prewar pro-Fascist Paris Jour, had contrived to slip out of Algiers, turn up in Madrid. With him was Jean Rigaud, long his secretary, fixer and crony and a member of the short-lived Giraud government. The Gaullists suspected that Allied officials had supplied the passes and transportation, that a serious effort to save the skins of many Vichymen was being prepared...
...General of Algeria, off to sympathetic Spain. He placed the anti-Vichy René Chambe in charge of propaganda. Charles Brunei, anti-Vichy former mayor of Algiers, was brought into the Council of War Economy. Reactionary General Jean Bergeret, Giraud's deputy civil commander, and Fascist-minded Jean Rigaud, political secretary of the North African war council, resigned. Previously Giraud had said: "I think after I announce my plans they will kick themselves...