Word: rolf
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Death by the Window. When General Manager Rudolf Bing decided to overhaul Carmen last spring, he handed the staging job to Tyrone Guthrie, topnotch director of London's Old Vic, and Designer Rolf Gerard. From the start, they decided on "naturalism," e.g., the workers in a Seville cigarette factory ought to look, for a change, a bit like factory workers...
...rushed around in the Christmas crush, getting exactly the right kind of wine glasses; he set his famed actress wife Lynn Fontanne to sewing lace hankies for "my girls," later, sent her backstage to perk up one discouraged singer with a little flattery. He huddled for hours with Designer Rolf Gerard on how to frame chamber-sized Così in the yawning spaces of the Met's big stage. Gerard's solution: a chamber-sized stage contrived by drapes and latticed arches, brilliantly simple sets in handsome pastels and white...
Wobbling Sphinxes. To build the new production of Verdi's triumphal tragedy of the Nile, Bing had brought in the same crack team that gave Verdi's Don Carlo a new glow last season: Broadway's Maggie Webster and Designer Rolf Gerard. They soon found out what everyone from Bing to Conductor Fausto Cleva definitely did not want: "All those wobbling sphinxes, painted canvas temples, unrehearsed supers in ridiculous costumes, and four-footed beasts." They set out to make the new Aïda "as simple and uncluttered as possible...
...Mozart's comic opera, Cosi fan tutte (last Met performance: 1928), will be redone from scratch-also in English-with new sets by Rolf (Don Carlo, Fledermaus) Gerard. Stage director: Broadway star Alfred Lunt...
...year-old Viennese farce of double identities and doubles entendres a shining new face,* he called on Playwright-Director Garson (Born Yesterday) Kanin. Lyricist (Inside U.S.A.) and M-G-M Vice President Howard Dietz supplied Kanin's "free adaptation" with a new English-speaking voice. Designer Rolf Gerard was recruited to repeat his earlier scenic success with Don Carlo; pint-sized Conductor Eugene Ormandy was borrowed from the Philadelphia Orchestra. The only thing not touched: Strauss's score, which, says Kanin, was "protected like a delicate child...