Word: ring
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Dates: during 1930-1939
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...Francisco Opera House have been patiently explaining that there are no more seats available. For four weeks inside the house preparations have gone on at fever pitch. This week begins the most ambitious undertaking in San Francisco's opera history: the presentation of Richard Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen, that mighty tetralogy which, 26 years in the making, includes the operas Das Rheingold, Die Walkure, Siegfried, Gotterdammerung...
...Francisco has heard the complete Ring only twice before, once by Manhattan's Metropolitan Opera when it visited there in 1900, once by the itinerant German Grand Opera in 1930. The German company had singers who were either worn out or third-rate. The scenery was shoddy, the orchestra ragged. For its first home-grown Ring, the San Francisco Opera is spending $80,000, importing such peerless Wagnerians as Soprano Kirsten Flagstad, Tenor Lauritz Melchior, Baritone Friedrich Schorr. Some $40,000 has been invested in scenery alone. There is a horrible, life-like dragon and a special new cloud...
...stagehands struggled with a spangled, 40-ft. jack-in-the-box which pops out of something no bigger than a suitcase. In a Brooklyn riding academy, 16 acrobatic dancers were in training for an equestrian ballet. Inside the Hippodrome the enormous stage had been extended to include a circus ring, and upon it 400 animals, among them a white horse from Sweden which claps its hoofs, were doing their tricks to the tootling of Paul Whiteman's band. Everywhere at once, Producer Rose, who stands 5 ft. 3 in., was barking directions, conferring heatedly, taking unintelligible notes in shorthand...
...peerless team of Rodgers & Hart to write his score, able Albert Johnson to do his sets and to refurnish (cost: $40,000) the fusty interior of North America's best-known show house (rental: $104,000 a year). He hired actors like Jimmy Durante, Arthur Sinclair, Blanche Ring for his star parts. And, catching them when they needed money, he contracted with Playwrights Ben Hecht & Charles MacArthur to write a libretto on which he could string his circus acts, stars and tunes. Messrs. Hecht & MacArthur repaired for a fortnight last winter to Suite No. 21, Villa Marguerita, Charleston...
...qualities of simplicity and tenderness, in which the best French pictures have so often outclassed Hollywood, give these little scenes a dramatic impact which, by comparison, makes the collapse of Pompeii (see p. 52) a pin drop. Good shot: in the ring of faces around the white rabbit, a minute, snub-nosed Negro, speechless with approval...